I am Sakina from Azerbaijan. I am a 27-year old HR specialist. Now that I’ve introduced myself, I want to share my COVID-19 experience.

My story about how COVID-19 affected my life is related to the financial issues of the pandemic. After our authorities informed us about the pandemic at first we thought that it would be something temporary. Then after a while, everyone realized that it was getting more serious day by day. After a couple of weeks, we went on a complete lockdown which affected every aspect of our lives.

I live here in Baku with my sister and my mother lives in our hometown that is four hours away from the capital. I rent a house here and monthly I send some money to my mother, as she is a single mom without any help. I lost almost 50 % of my monthly income because of lockdown since I was working from home. So it was literally so hard to pay the rent and at the same to help my mom financially. After realizing that I was struggling to fulfill my financial obligations, I asked the owner of the apartment for some kind of temporary discount. Fortunately, he told me that I can pay just 70% of the rent for three months and not worry about it.

To conclude, I’d like to highlight the fact that I was one of the very few lucky ones in terms of the rent payment. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who have been kicked out of their houses due to this issue, without any prior consent or not paying attention to their current situation. It breaks my heart that people don’t try to have empathy and put themselves in those people’s place. This whole thing is temporary, I am sure, but our attitude is important and the way we behave matters a lot.

I just wish people, not only in my country but also all over the world would be more gentle, kind and thoughtful towards each other, because I believe there is no other way of living in a peaceful society.