Cause and effect - Alan Castaneda

Alan Eduardo Castaneda Garcia

ESL 100 CE

November 03, 2024

The Virus of Changes

Never underestimate a virus; it can change your life. My parents own a butcher shop, and a grocery store until today located in Jalisco, Mexico. At first, it was just the butcher shop. My grandmother, from my father's side, used to be the original owner, but she decided to give it to my father when he met my mother. My parents have been the owners for twenty-five years. I remember I was a little kid when they decided to combine the grocery store with the butcher shop. They continued making improvements to the store, and they even hired an extra employee to make deliveries. Everything was going perfectly until the pandemic happened. The effects of the pandemic not only affected my parents’ business, but the routes of our lives. 

At the start of the pandemic clients started coming less frequently, fewer than my parents expected. In my hometown, the stores didn’t close completely, but they made a few changes. Every business had to implement new sanitary standards, including wearing masks, sanitizing their hands to enter the place, and stepping through a sanitizing carpet before entering the store. Some people didn’t like the sanitary standards, so they preferred to go to stores that didn’t care about that. My parents used to have clients from other businesses as well, specifically from food businesses. Since those businesses were struggling as well, they started to buy less from my parents’ store, so my parents lost clients from both sides. 

Things couldn’t have gotten worse, but they did when my parents got COVID. Even though my parents always followed the sanitary standards, it was inevitable to catch COVID because they had to deal with clients in person. Some people didn’t believe that there was a virus; they were very skeptical. The people that used to think that way usually didn’t wear masks and didn’t care about any sanitary standards. That could have been the reason why my parents got COVID. Both of the stores had to been closed while my parents recovered. They stayed in a kind of farmhouse that was used for family gatherings located in a small town called La Laja. During that time, I stayed at my grandmother’s house. The good thing is that my aunt is a doctor, so she was in charge of prescribing medicine to my parents. 

Once my parents recovered from COVID, my father decided we were going to move to United States to find better opportunities. That was in a certain way a break from the butcher shop and the grocery store. We had also just gotten our United States residence at that time. My father decided to rent both of the stores to a friend of his, so it would be an income while we moved and settled down. In addition, my parents started to build a house in our hometown before the pandemic happened, so all of that was left on pause. Coming to the United States to find a better income to restore everything sounded great to my father. We moved to Grayslake Illinois, because some family members live there, and my uncle let us stay in his house while we found a place. A few months later, another of my uncles who owns an apartment building in Chicago told us that he had one free, and he could rent it to us. So, we moved to Chicago. 

Our lives have changed a lot in a short period of time. I think nobody expected COVID to be that big, or at least my parents and I didn’t. That virus changed our lives. Now that we have been living in Chicago for two years, the plans for my parents are to finish building the house and go back to living in our hometown. They don’t like it here that much. I think my plans might be the same when I grow older. I don’t see myself living all my life in Chicago, but everything can change. Only time will tell.