Finding purpose and perspective in a crisis......

Barcelona. March 22. 2020

The view from our rooftop in Barcelona reveals a ghost city. Everything is shuttered. Many of our neighbours are bunkering down on the Costa Brava. There are no white sailing boats bobbing in the distant Mediterranean. The heart and soul of Catalunya, The Camp Nou, sits dormant. Almost, but not quite, forgotten.

Life has been like this for a week now, and the Gobierno de España will soon declare a lockdown that will effectively place 50 million people under benign house arrest until Easter and, most likely, beyond.

Not even during the Spanish Civil War, or when Franco died was the nation curfewed in this way. If I drive down the mountain, into the eighteenth-century neighbourhood of tightly packed streets below us, I will almost certainly encounter a Guardia Urbana patrol, keeping the roads humanity free. The bright green Monk Parakeets, finally, have Gracia to themselves.

In these extraordinary times, I feel thankful for the Barcelona that is lost. Like Milan, at its best, it can be the most intoxicating place to live in the world. Walk into any neighbourhood bar here, and you will find it impossible to think straight as you are drowned out by a cacophony of animated conversation.

Spain has never come with volume control, and this is one of the reasons it's so extraordinarily sad to witness a heavy black curtain fall on life in such a vibrant and passionate place.

In the 1940s the American author, Paul Bowles, felt drawn to Tangier, on the far side of the Mediterranean from where I write this, mainly because he felt invigorated by the idea of community and life being more open.

For him, an existence lived out, less behind closed doors, and more receptive to the world, to communality, was the dream - bypassing the veneer of control and respectability he was expected to live by at home in New York.

In The Sheltering Sky, my favourite book published in 1949, Bowles wrote: "Sunset is such a sad hour. If I watch the end of a day—any day—I always feel it's the end of a whole epoch. And autumn! It might as well be the end of everything. That's why I hate cold countries and love the warm ones, where there's no winter, and when night comes, you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of closing down."

This is Spain for me. A place with open arms - brimming with life - when other places in Europe retreat. The unprecedented hush we are all experiencing, and the growing sense of loss across Europe, feels best reflected in this haunting image (above) of a field hospital in the National Convention Centre in Madrid.

Out of shot long rows of medics wait for the worst that can be thrown at them. Tonight these same nurses and doctors will walk home, exhausted, along familiar streets that are now empty and silent. As things stand in this fast-moving crisis, around 12% or 3,475 of Spain's confirmed cases – are doctors, nurses and others on the frontlines of the coronavirus battle. Earlier this week, Spain lost its first healthcare worker to the virus: A 52-year-old nurse from the Basque Country. The whole country mourned.

Yet, compared to the UK certainly, Spain has gone about isolation and retreating to a relatively silent world with relative dignity. In parts of London, fuelled by social media, panic and dissent has, in effect, gone viral. Perhaps not surprising when you consider 340,000 of our fellow global citizens have contracted Covid-19 in relatively short order, and that figure will undoubtedly increase dramatically without effective containment and unprecedented societal disruption.

We are at the beginning of what will, realistically, be month-long isolation in our family home in Barcelona. We already function independently on different floors: Online schooling. Conference calls. Editing.

As third-culture students in an International School, my son and daughter were respectively born in India and South Africa and are accustomed to profound social and environmental change. Regardless of all of this, I can still see they are deeply anxious about the unravelling situation with Covid-19.

Of course, it's immensely challenging to explain this multi-layered crisis to children, particularly early teenagers, for whom wildcat climate strikes at school are already creating an aura of doom around the broken and disrupted world they will inherit. Yet we are luckier than most and should, above all else, have perspective, a word that right or wrong, I keep returning to when I consider current events.

This morning, in our now shared schoolroom/study, I talk my son through a rudimentary World Health Organisation Chart on global causes of death. Since December 2019, 13,000 people may have died from Covid-19, yet each year ischaemic heart disease kills between 14 and 16 million people - victims of all ages, races and economic backgrounds.

Cancer, which killed three of my four grandparents, took the lives of 9.6 million people in 2018. Diarrhoeal diseases still kill around 1.4 million people each year. I try to give him perspective through cold data and then my own personal experience.

As a film-maker and writer, I have reported overtly and covertly from over 120 countries, including some of the most hostile environments in the world. A long list that includes Somalia, Yemen, Liberia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and The Palestinian West Bank.

I have spent my career seeking out unthinkable stories - human-focused and emotional narratives that are, often wrought through with trauma, cruelty, heartache and loss. One of my latest Cambridge University lectures is based entirely on storytelling around children's rights in times of crisis, framed in the context of conflict, natural disasters and human rights challenges.

I remember walking across a flattened neighbourhood in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, after the Kashmir earthquake, and seeing the lifeless arm of a young girl, sticking out of the debris – her hand, painted with faded henna.

A younger version of me stands in a damp village hall in Mannar, a Northern province of Sri Lanka, in the aftermath of a bomb attack on a school bus, silently looking down at the remains of a dozen children, swathed in white linen.

My mind drifts back to an arid plain in Central Somalia, during an assignment with the Italian photographer. Giulio Di Sturco, whose image is below, reporting on famine. I can see an infant's lost and milky, gaze on his mothers back.

He is past pleading. I search for more statistics to find reason and give my son a deeper perspective. I tell him that around 9 million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every year, more than the lives taken by AIDS and tuberculosis combined.

Our film company, Miran, shot a film for UNICEF in The Congo on Malaria. Last year alone, there were an estimated 228 million cases of malaria worldwide, with roughly 400,000 deaths as a direct result. The unusable footage we have of mothers, grandmothers and infants dying in the excruciating grip of the disease is devastating.

I realise, of course, that I am talking to my children about perspective, partly because I lost my own version of normality a long time ago. If I was to be honest - the dilemma, for me personally, has always been to reconcile the extremes of situations I have reported on with the normality and peace of home.

Home has always been safety. Solace. Distant from the safe house or the trauma of the refugee camp and field hospital. Framed against this perceived sanctuary, Covid-19 would appear to have crossed all of these boundaries in a matter of a few days. Like many professionals who have operated in hostile environments, we are now seeing the lottery of the field coming to our own front door. 

When I speak to my own parents on WhatsApp, I hear genuine and understandable fear. Our elders are most at risk. Historians are already comparing this crisis to the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic, that is estimated to have killed 50 million people globally.

Yet it seems extraordinary to think it was the young who were disproportionately affected by that outbreak, just over a century ago, leading to theories that older people had some protection due to exposure to an earlier, similar influenza strain.

By stark contrast, Covid-19 is disproportionately impacting the over-60s. I read an Oxford University study yesterday that suggests Spain and Italy have been hardest hit because the elderly are included in society - the priceless generational connection and love of extended family that both nations are known for have effectively been their undoing.

Landlocked at home, in the evenings, we watch the heart-rendering video testimony of doctors in Lombardy and, as a European, I find myself deeply moved and humbled by their bravery and stories, their extraordinary sense of public duty.  In their eyes, I can also see something more familiar to me - the haunted look of the African field clinic.

I have seen it countless times in the faces of the exhausted MSF doctors in the Sahel or Yemen, swimming against the tide to save every precious life. Italy's doctors, like many other medics on the frontline, communicate the same thing, over and over...saving the most acute patients from Covid-19 is like trying to grip the air as you fall through it.  

Closer to home, my sister-in-law, a brilliant and dedicated surgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxfordshire, is preparing for what she, quite rightly, describes as a war. She, like many NHS professionals, is anxious about equipment and the ability to respond to her patients to the best of her ability. She has always put the NHS and her faith in public health first, above herself, and even her own family.

She is a selfless public servant who became a doctor for a moment in time like this. Troublingly, in the UK, Downing Street talks about "renting" space in private hospitals and lining the pockets of investors. Here in Spain, the language is "requisition" of the private sector and our own paid for health care, effectively just became public, as it should be.

What strikes me most is the fact that this narrative, of not having control over our wider destiny, is unfamiliar in many of the places Covid-19 has struck hard and fast. Places like affluent Lombardy in Italy or in upscale residential neighbourhoods of Madrid. Day by day, I realise this crisis isn't about scale.

It's about coping with what's in front of us and a situation we have never had to deal with before. We should all be empathetic to that, regardless of perspective.

In an interview with Time Magazine, Mary Alvord, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine, suggested that the panic buying we have seen in recent days gives people, not accustomed to such a crisis, a grip on their immediate destiny.

I worry most about the economics of this pandemic. The ability to fight this virus was always destined to be about social circumstances and, in time when it reaches the tightly packed townships of Johannesburg or the sprawling basti's of Mumbai we will understand that.

Through my human rights lens, I believe the context of this crisis should also be seen through outcomes for the weakest in society. I hear, too often on the news, that children are relatively immune from Covid-19. The opposite is true. They are not immune when their mother is reliant on a part-time job to put food on the table.

Gaby Hinsliff writes eloquently in The Guardian this week about the social and economic cost of lockdown: "People whose jobs have vanished from beneath their feet need money to live on," she writes. "But soon they'll also need a purpose, something to do for months on end.

We will have a vast reservoir of bored, frustrated, depressed citizens whose jobs weren't essential to survival on the one hand, and on the other, a shortage of people to do essential work from social care to food production as others go down sick. Should they be trained or organised to fill the sinkholes that will open up in society?"

Yet at the heart of the panic, we are witnessing there is also evidence that short-termism is at play across Europe - a denial that this kind of situation won't become the new normal. That this pandemic can somehow be defeated, and for good. I find myself thinking what happens if this becomes the new normal – a seasonal blight on our lives? I realise, in the middle of the storm, that many of us are not ready to accept that possibility.

As a global storyteller, I am concerned about how this crisis is communicated in the media and beyond. It is, of course, understandable that we are so consumed by what is currently in front of us that it is challenging to contemplate the bigger picture. Yet we are in danger of losing track not only of what comes next but also what brought us here in the first place. One of the key impacts of the Covid-19 outbreak, aside from the tragic human and economic toll, has been a sudden lurch away from the realities of the climate emergency, an issue that was, finally, occupying the mainstream.

Yet it is also beyond dispute that humanity's destruction of biodiversity plays a major role in creating the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19. As our food and timber needs expand we open up tropical forest tracts and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants, and within those creatures, viruses we cannot defeat or live with.

Whilst reporting on the border of Sudan and Uganda a number of years ago whispers reached me of an ebola outbreak. The leap, like HIV before it, had been made from bushmeat to humans during a time of civil war - in a region that had already been struck by nodding syndrome, a mysterious form of epilepsy that occurs in onchocerciasis-endemic areas. WHO themselves argue that human activity, such as conflict, road building, mining and logging opened up Africa to Ebola.

The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals. When the time is right we need to link pandemics to our corrosive and destructive role on the environment. In many respects, I have come to realise that human rights reporting, a seemingly endless cycle of decay, loss, survival and fatalism, that I have been on for two decades, is linked to something bigger, in the same way, that Covid-19 is.

It's becoming increasingly feasible to argue that climate change, or its innumerable facets, has, somehow, been there at the heart of many of the stories I have personally reported on in six of our seven continents. It doesn't matter how it presents itself; Global Warming. Tsunami. Typhoon. Drought. Famine. Globalisation. Pollution. Greenhouse gases. Human Trafficking. Overfishing. Acid rain. Civil War. Fire. Flood. Decline. Extinction. Epidemic....

The words I repeatedly hear from eyewitnesses across the world communicate discombobulation and horror at the profound societal and environmental changes they are experiencing around them. I have borrowed a name for it, and I use it in my new lecture on climate crisis storytelling - the invisible player.  

We recently committed our film company, Miran Media, to focus much of our storytelling around the climate crisis and the same can be said for my own personal journalism projects, long-term investigations like my recent work for The Guardian on mental illness and climate in Greenland. We will also shortly make a film on Covid-19 for a client.

Today I read some old notes from a long-forgotten assignment to Afghanistan to cover the war. I had sat in the courtyard of an addiction clinic and watched a boy, roughly my son's age now, rock back and forward – delirious with Opium addiction.

Crouched, praying for escape, in cheap plastic sandals. Grinding his raw hands into the dirt. Behind him, 30 others were curled up in isolation. There was no camaraderie; each was consumed by their own circumstance and suffering. Afghanistan was hooked on mourning, hopelessness and drugs.

Ryszard Kapuściński wrote of Africa, where I lived and worked as The Sunday Times Africa Correspondent for many years, that "Ordinary people treat political cataclysms, coups d'état, military takeovers, revolutions and wars - as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature."

In some respects, I agree with him - my own experiences in the world's very worst places teach me that resilience and fatalism often go together. When it has been your world since your first breath, you often accept the extreme because it's written in the stars or because of your perceived station in life.

Regardless of the scale of what we are seeing in recent weeks, I do feel strongly that we must search out perspective in these hellish times - to not forget the lives of others who face adversity, as a matter of routine - even when we are facing such formidable challenge ourselves. As we have been asked to do with self-isolation, there are no social choices to remove yourself from a wartime siege when you are an LGBT Syrian refugee fleeing ISIS or a child refugee interred behind razor-wire in a cold migrant camp in Greece.

I often think about the lives of the many women I interviewed during a lengthy assignment reporting on a series around Rape As A Weapon of War in conflict-ridden Congo and later in post-war Bosnia, where the legacy of sexual abuse continues down the decades. I reflect, in particular, on this extraordinary image of a rape victim, below, who was burned after she was sexually assaulted.

Captured in the DRC by my friend and colleague, Robin Hammond, the woman holds her child to her breast. Her rapist's child. For her, the liberty to protect oneself or choose their own destiny is a distant dream. To be able to react to a crisis in a measured and relatively secure way, as many of us are with Covid 19, is unthinkable for rape victims in the DRC.

It's important to understand that many people in the world, including the unprecedented 70.8 million refugees, who have been forced from home by conflict and persecution since 2018, have spent their recent lives in a permanent war footing, in semi-permanent fear for their lives.

Above all else, Covid-19 is making me contemplate something I have never really thought through before. That I have never really felt in control of my own children's destiny because I have always seen what can happen to generations when the ground beneath their feet is ripped apart - when there is no protection or safety net.  

There are undeniably trauma and profound sadness and loss in the midst of this genuine and terrifying virus we face as a society, but the truth is many of us in Europe will ultimately have the means to manage it and recover.

Being at the heart of a crisis in the home front I am also humbled by the resilience of my fellow Europeans. On the first day of our Barcelona lockdown a cacerolada rung proudly out across the city - a form of protest and defiance that is popular here in Barcelona and a ritual I have also witnessed first-hand in Santiago and Beirut. Local people, banging pots on their balconies to support one another, or in this case, the nurses and doctors on the frontline of the crisis.

As Catalunya extends the closure of its airports, ports and roads to the world until Easter, don't be surprised to hear grandmothers banging pots from their windows in defiance each evening - just like local people singing arias in Sienna or the people of Wuhan shouting support across tower blocks.

Across the globe, a coronavirus culture is emerging, spontaneously and creatively, to deal with public fear, restrictions on daily life, and the tedious isolation of quarantine. Agustín Fuentes, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, envisions a profound evolutionary process to ensure the survival of the species as pandemics become more common. His hope is we become kinder, and indeed acts of decency and solidarity are burgeoning on social media, at least.  

Yet to do that we also must look harder at the suffering around us - beyond the immediate context. The food bank at the end of our street that we walk past and ignore on our daily commute. The footage of the refugee family under the violent paramilitary cosh on the Turkish border. The child soldier shackled in iron chains in prison in Sudan, below, a young man slowly dying from malaria, who we once photographed in Juba.

Outside, in the relative solitude of home, I can hear the church bells from Monastir de Pedralbes and, until a rainstorm swept over the city, birdsong floated over our balconies. I have decided to reflect on my graces and accept that homeworking is where the heart is, and as someone who spends half his life in the field or walking through distant, soulless, airports, I should be grateful for that, above all else. Across the world scientists, poets, coders, engineers, academics, and even billionaires, are similarly trapped within the four walls of their homes.

This could be the perfect time to find clarity and come up with a eureka moment or even to create a powerful social, human rights or environmental movement that could, somehow, change the path and improve the future for the next generation.

We were due to see Nick Cave perform here in Barcelona in a few weeks time. In place of the real thing I show my children the final scene from his semi-fictionalised documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth. As he attempts to make sense of his own quasi-mythical existence, Cave writes his own, imagined, eulogy:

“All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world; a little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it. If you can hold on to that flame, great things can be constructed around it; things that are massive and powerful and world-changing. All held up by the tiniest of ideas."

Dan McDougall is a British Foreign Correspondent of the Year and the founder of the global content agency Miran Media. Open Water - his latest film Guardian Documentaries focuses on climate change and mental illness. https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2019/dec/02/open-water-lives-of-three-greenlanders-climate-crisis