Suzen Murakoshi, who runs a theater company and teaches workshops, is out of work. But she supports keeping the stay-at-home orders in effect.

Excerpt from Civil Beat Article By Anita Hofschneider

Suzen Murakoshi is a performer.

The Aiea resident practices Yamuna body rolling, a type of body therapy that helps improve movement and performance. She’s been performing all her life, everything from acting on television and film to clowning, dancing and Broadway theater. She teaches Yamuna workshops at the Honolulu Club and next month was planning to go on tour with her theater company to Orlando, Florida.

All of that ended when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation.

Murakoshi, a self-described news junkie, had been reading about the virus since January. By the end of February, she postponed all her classes, concerned that some of her elderly students could be infected by the respiratory illness that has no known cure. She hasn’t been able to work since.

“Everything that I do is about breathing in the presence of other people and touch,” she says. “My whole life has been devoted to being in the presence of other people.”

But even though she and her husband are both out of work and still waiting for their unemployment checks, Murakoshi says she’s glad Hawaii officials have been requiring everyone to stay at home.

“There’s a lot of grief in terms of what life used to be,” says Murakoshi, a “sense of grieving in terms of what was lost, and grieving in terms of missed opportunities as it goes on.”

Every day she reads the news. “It’s insane, what does this mean?” she thought when she read about the drop in oil prices. “How does this ripple through the whole economy? How can I prepare?”

When she drives, the absence of traffic reminds her of what Oahu was like when she was growing up. “It feels like we’ve kind of gone back in time a little bit in terms of pace, and the energy of the community is a lot slower and a lot easier.”

She has been spending time expanding her garden, which already has taro, mint, papayas and oranges. She makes masks, takes online classes, walks her dogs and surfs when she can. But she stopped singing with a group that was visiting assisted living facilities.

Even though there have been relatively few COVID-19-related deaths in Hawaii, she still worries another wave of cases will come this fall. “The second wave of any set is bigger. It’s coming.”

Taken from Civil Beatʻs Article: ʻWhat Was It All For?ʻ: Divide Grows Over Hawaiiʻs Lockdown

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