Family

I have a brother that lives in Bogota, Colombia.  He and his wife can’t go out together. And when they leave one at a time, they can only go to the grocery store, pharmacy, or doctor’s office. The police stop them and ask questions each time they leave. My brother is a runner, so he’s taken to running to the grocery store. Then sometimes he runs a loop to a couple of other grocery stores because he “can’t find an item he has to have”. He’s got a nice 6-mile loop that’s working for him, but he has to be careful. Last week a police car followed him the last mile and made sure he went into his apartment building.

My other brother has a wife and two small kids and lives in Panama. They live right off a fairly remote beach on a big piece of land. His daughter just turned 6, so they walked the 4 blocks down the path to the beach. After about 45 minutes, two officials walked up and issued both my brother and his wife tickets. It was an expensive birthday party. And it doesn’t stop there. Twice a week he gets two hours to go out for supplies at a designated time. He goes through roadblocks where they check his ID card to make sure the last numbers match his designated time code. His wife gets three times a week, same deal. And every night the entire country gets a national broadcast where the latest about the pandemic is shared with the whole country including updates on the numbers of cases and how the country is doing on their national strategy. There’s a campaign that’s everywhere called “Solidarity” where its re-emphasized that if everyone doesn’t pull together it drags on longer and more people die.

My brothers and I are close. They always ask about the Galveston beach when we talk. When I told them that the Texas beaches are opening up for business, they are incredulous. Then I showed them what the beaches looked like last weekend during “quarantine”. Explained how the Beach Patrol made almost 5,000 enforcement actions last weekend alone trying to keep people off the beach. Not to mention what the Galveston Police Department and Code Enforcement have done. They are from here and they still were shocked.

But now that’s water under the bridge and, as always, we deal with what we’ve got to work with. We’re ramping up as fast as possible. It’s Cinco De Mayo weekend so parks will be open, and the available guards we do have will be out. Fortunately, the Park Board has approved use of some of our reserve funds to cover the beaches during the summer. Until we get some new ones trained, we’ll be short staffed. So be smart, be safe, and swim near a Lifegaurd.

We’ll have a lifeguard academy starting May 5th. We need guards bad, so pass the word to check our website for details.

 

Photo by: Keri Heath, The Daily News