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(Reuters) – She’d picked her dress, they’d booked their honeymoon and the wedding was set for the end of March. Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit.
FEED THE POOR
Feeding the poor and needy is an act that draws us closer to Allah. We earn His forgiveness, mercies and blessings through this act of charity.
“Anyone who looks after and works for a widow and a poor person is like a warrior fighting for Allah?s cause, or like a person who fasts during the day and prays all night. (Bukhari)
So the two young American doctors, Kashif Chaudhry and Naila Shereen, whose whirlwind courtship spun them between New York City and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, cancelled their big plans.
Two weeks ago, they persuaded the imam at a mosque in Hawthorne, New Jersey, to open up for a quick nikkah marriage contract ceremony. The couple married the following day on Saturday and celebrated with her family at her parents’ house in New Windsor, New York. After the ceremony, Shereen dropped her new husband at the airport 12 hours later.
“We said our goodbyes – we were a bit teary and sad,” he said. “I gave her a red rose.”
Shereen was back at work by Monday.
As an internal medicine chief resident overseeing teams of residents, she rotates through different hospitals in New York, the epicenter of America’s coronavirus outbreak. So far the disease has infected more than one million people and killed over 50,000 worldwide.
Shereen is working long days but says doctors are trying to keep each others’ spirits up by swapping snacks and trading funny videos.
“We all know New York is bad but we know the worst is yet to come,” she said. “I never thought I’d live through a pandemic.”
Chaudhry, a 37-year-old cardiac electrophysiologist, is seeing patients via videoconferencing where he works at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They’ve cancelled all elective operations to try to conserve their protective equipment when the coronavirus tsunami hits. But while his head is in Iowa, his heart is in New York.
“I worry a lot about her,” he said. “But I’m really proud of her.”
“We project that roughly 56 percent of our population – 25.5 million people – will be infected with the virus over an eight week period,” Governor Newsom of California wrote on 3/19/2020.