‘Wear a Mask’ Campaign for the COVID-19 to Aware the Common People

 

‘Wear a Mask’ Campaign

Date: 19.04.2021 (Monday)

Time: 1pm – 3pm

Organised by: N.S.D Educational Welfare Trust

Participants: Sahin Sahari, Sudipta Das, Sunirmal Singha, Abdul Ganiun, Rik Saha

Venue: DNC College Road

Proceedings:

With the onset of the second wave of Covid 19, India’s situation seems to get worse with lesser awareness of the mass to follow the safety protocols. In order to raise awareness and educate the people of Aurangabad City, Murshidabad on the importance of wearing a mask, N.S.D Educational Welfare Trust organized ‘Wear a Mask’ Campaign on 19th April, 2021 at DNC College Road.

Volunteers and members of the trust set up a temporary mask distribution booth for the day. Audio clips for mask awareness were played through sound systems to make the people understand the utility of wearing a mask. The team started to locate pedestrians without a mask and spoke to them why they did not wear a mask. Then the team sanitized their hands and handed them a disposable mask to wear and a chocolate as a goodwill gesture.

In the afternoon it was seen that the crowd in the public area diminished and many went indoors early to end their Ramadan fast. Hence few of the masks remained undistributed which the team is planning to use in another mask awareness campaign. Overall, the campaign was a success since a large chunk of people could be reached in the stipulated time period. It is believed that the common people whom the team could reach out for raising awareness, would continue wearing a mask in public spaces and would also spread the awareness to their near ones as a trickle-down effect of the campaign.

Debrief:

After completion of the campaign the team discussed about the success and shortcomings of the campaign. It was noticed that many people were scared to collect the masks as they thought that they might be bullied and ridiculed by the trust members. In return, when they saw that they were not bullied but were logically made understand about the use of mask, they were impressed and happily agreed to wear a mask in future. The team discussed how they can overcome this instilled fear among the public of being bullied when approached for the mask campaign. In many cases it was seen that the masks were in the pockets/bags/cars but still the people were too ignorant to wear them. Nevertheless, the entire team unanimously agreed that more such campaign should be organized in future until the number of Covid cases comes under control in India.