Pandemic in Focus
Manna in a Time of Corona
Photographer: Ted Lieverman
Pandemic in Focus
Exhibit Title: Manna in a Time of Corona
Location: United States
MANNA, a Philadelphia nonprofit started in 1990, prepares and delivers healthy, balanced meals for patients who have a life-threatening illness and are at acute nutritional risk. The organization depends heavily on volunteers, but the COVID-19 pandemic substantially decreased the number of volunteers provided by corporations and other institutions.
Still, volunteers arrived every workday to help the cooks prepare and package meals, or to deliver a week’s supply of meals in the Philadelphia area. The volunteers are of different races, ages, social and educational backgrounds. Their sense of obligation to common decency shows how the country as a whole should have responded to this crisis.
MANNA, a nonprofit started in 1990, has been relying on volunteers since its founding to help prepare healthy, balanced meals for patients at home in need – at no cost to the patients. In the beginning, it focused on people with AIDS who were too sick to shop and cook for themselves. In 2006, Manna expanded its mission to include patients with a life-threatening illness and an acute nutritional risk.
My wife had been a volunteer at MANNA for over a year and continued to go in even as news of the pandemic took over the headlines. I started photogtraphing the volunteers in mid-March 2020. I found a serene collection of volunteers of different races, ages, social and educational backgrounds. No one seemed tense or fearful, but were friendly and sociable while still working diligently. They knew that clients’ lives essentially depend on receiving all their meals from MANNA.
A number of writers in 2020 remembered Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague about a fictional outbreak of bubonic plague in the 1940s in a dusty city in Algeria. The rats come out of the cellars by the thousands to die in bloody heaps; then the people begin to die. Isolated and forbidden to leave town, most residents react with fatalism or selfishness.
The most important and hopeful aspect of Camus’ novel is the creation of the sanitary squads, volunteers who inspect houses for cleanliness, accompany doctors on their home visits, arrange hospitalization of the infected, and dispose of the dead. The volunteers are exposed to the disease for which there is no cure, and yet they continue to work until exhaustion or death.
MANNA volunteers are not facing the same risk as Camus' sanitary squads (although in 2020, it was far from clear), nor were they exposed to the same risks as medical personnel treating COVID patients. But their sense of obligation to common decency shows how the country should have responded to the pandemic.
MANNA mannapa.org
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