Photo by Joe Pranoto Marslo at unsplash.com
I’m from Toronto, Ontario. I’m a junior in high school, and I’m 15 years old. I want to study software engineering and construction.
During the pandemic, all the masses went online. Now that things are slowly opening up these past months, we’ve gone back to church in person. However, there’s been a lot of people who still want to stay at home for their own safety, and a lot of parishes have not opened up to maximum capacity yet.
A lot of the people who prefer to stay home for their own safety are a bit older, and so we continue to stream mass through the internet so they can follow from home. But when they are at home, it’s hard for them to hear what’s going on. There are a lot of responses that get lost, and it’s very jarring.
One of the new things that they’ve started in the church was live responses, and in every mass, there is a person on the right side who is answering on the mic, which goes directly to the live stream. In this way, the people at home can really follow along and can join in with the responses that are streamed via microphone.
I thought that this was an opportunity to give, and I started saying the responses for the live stream. It needed some effort to arrive a bit earlier and answer clearly, but I was happy to do that so that people could follow online.
However, not everything went smoothly. There was an elderly man who came up to me after mass. He used a walker and he was very frail. He told me that his hearing was very poor and having me talking into the microphone actually hurt his ears due to his hearing aids. So, although I was helping the people online, some people who participated in person suffered because the mic was too loud.
The next Sunday, I tried my very best to speak a little softer, still loud enough to be live streamed, but at the same time hoping that no one’s hearing got damaged. After the mass, I went back to the man who approached me, and he was just beaming. He was so happy that he was able to participate in the mass without feeling pain in his ears.
To make it even better, when I came home, my mom actually had watched that specific mass online before going to work, and she said that the volume was perfect.
It was a win-win situation for everyone, and it really made me happy that I was patient enough to love until finding the right solution.
