She heard the birds as never before during these fraught times, and that gave Priscilla M. Garces another reason to be hopeful.

A native of Ecuador who came to Newark and later Union, New Jersey after suffering medical complications as a consequence of being born premature, Garces said she felt a certain heightened level of anxiety in the early days of the pandemic but she toughed it out, which is what she’s always done, with the help of her beloved family and friends – and thanks to her ongoing irrepressible curiosity about the world.

“For me I would say I count my blessings every day because of the fact that I have my family around who help me out,” Garces told InsiderNJ today in a Zoom interview. “Initially it was a real shock, especially the first week. Sometimes I had a lot of worries. I though, ‘What if I get sick? What if I ended up in the hospital? Who is going to be able to take care of all of the other things if I end up in an unfamiliar setting? Sometimes you never know how getting COVID impacts you.

“I started writing different things, different thoughts in my notes and getting involved in different activities so I could be less distracted by all the things I had been hearing about COVID and basically tried to stay calm and relaxed,” she added.

She also heard “thousands of bird, in a way I’ve never heard before and I was telling my family, ‘Look, these birds… this is something we’ve never seen before. They’re saying thank you for having a quieter environment, for allowing them to reclaim their space.’ This is when everything was locked down and quiet.”

A candidate for the Newark Board of Education in 2019, Garces went through the Newark Schools System and graduated with honors from Seton Hall University with a bachelor’s degree in diplomacy and international relations. Employed by the NJ Immigrants Alliance, she holds a Master’s Degree in nonprofit leadership from Fordham University and a translator certification from New York University.

“The whole year has been very challenging for everybody but especially people with disabilities,” she said. “This whole situation magnified different policy weaknesses, including education.”

She expounded in the InsiderNJ interview, which can be viewed in full below: