Story co-written with Tessa Bradshaw
WCU’s Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning will be hosting a silent vigil this Thursday, March 18, from 8-9 p.m. at the University Catafount and Alumni Tower to reflect on living during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the vigil, faculty and students will have the option to stop by for a few minutes or stay for the full hour. The whole purpose of this event is to take time to process the hardships from the past year, remember those who were victims of COVID-19, and take a few minutes to think about what life will be like moving forward.
Surrounding the fountain and leading to the Alumni Tower, will be A-frame boards with quotes from people such as Joe Biden, Roy Cooper, and Chancellor Kelli Brown mixed with statistics about the spread of COVID-19 over the past year. Accompanying the A-frame boards will be white bags with artificial candle lights inside. Each light is to represent 1000 lives that were lost to COVID-19; there’s going to be approximately 530 bags for over half a million people who died from COVID-19. The event is part of the Catamounts Care Day, and the goal is to make this an annual event.
The Executive Director for Community Engagement and Service Learning, Lane Perry, spearheaded Catamounts Care Day, as well as encouraged the community to practice public health safety measures, with the help of 23 student ambassadors. Perry hopes the vigil will allow the participants to “take that breathe from the past that we forgot to take” and “reflect on how far we’ve come.”
“For me, I have always seen the value of reflection,” said Perry during a zoom interview.
He also referred to taking a moment of silence as a “pause.”
Catamounts Care is WCU’s public health campaign that encourages the on-campus community to participate in slowing the spread of COVID-19. The student ambassadors who were involved in the campaign had 3 goals; to educate and inform the community, to be visible examples, and to provide positive reinforcement for those on campus who were practicing the appropriate safety measures. Positive reinforcement included an ambassador giving the participant a sticker.
Catamounts Care day will practice social distancing, masks will be required, and there will also be a reduced capacity in order to accommodate social distancing.
