By Claire Stremple, March 23, 2021
For a project set against the backdrop of COVID-19, the field is the living room. It’s also the office and the production studio. But when that living room is in a tiny town of just over 2,000 people at the northern end of the longest, deepest fjord in North America, surrounded by glacier-carved mountain ranges for hundreds of miles, the field is pretty far, well, afield. It’s also 100 miles from the nearest hospital, but only by small aircraft or ferry, because there is no road. This is why I was writing in the first place.
My project was to report on the experience of women from rural and remote parts of Alaska who were pregnant when the pandemic hit. Labor is not an event that can be easily cancelled or delayed, like most events were in 2020. Women in rural and remote areas of Alaska travel long distances through remote territory to access specialized care. It’s already daunting, but as states rolled out pandemic travel restrictions and deaths mounted in city centers, Alaskans without ready hospital access had reason for concern.
Early in 2020, when the National Fellowship was announced, I planned for my grant to go towards the travel necessary to complete the story. I imagined my reporting experience would include travel to at least two communities other than my own, both about 1,000 miles away in other parts of Alaska, where I live. But as COVID-19 cases ticked up in Alaska, a remote state with limited hospital beds, it became clear that travel was a risk to my remote community and to the remote communities I hoped to visit. There was no way I could justify potentially passing COVID-19 to a pregnant woman who lives in a town without a hospital. I made my peace with reporting from the kitchen table and the couch.
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