Nearly every job in the District has been upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Some people are working from their homes instead of going into an office; others have taken pay cuts or lost their jobs entirely. But there are plenty of people who are still doing their work in person, even as the world has changed dramatically. This series features the voices of the “still at workers,” telling us what their lives are like right now and what they wish other people knew about being an essential worker during a pandemic.

Ana Hernandez, a 38-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, is a janitor at a law firm in downtown D.C. She lives in an apartment in Silver Spring with her three children: a 17-year-old daughter, a 14-year-old son, and an 8-year-old daughter. As the pandemic has shut down huge swaths of the city around her, Hernandez has continued commuting in to her job each day to clean the office.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity, and translated from Spanish.

How has your job changed since the start of the pandemic?

Before, we did regular, normal cleaning. We checked all the offices to see if there was trash, we looked around and cleaned things if they were dirty.

Now everything is about disinfecting areas. That’s what we’re doing. The idea is to keep the areas all disinfected, so that if a lawyer comes into the office, they’re free of the risk of catching the virus.

Even though most lawyers aren’t coming in right now, some are. There’s always one or two coming through, and our job is supposed to be to keep the area safe for them.

What kind of safety measures or PPE are you using to do your job? How are you staying safe?

Before all this happened, they gave us unlimited gloves. They weren’t telling us how many gloves we could use in a night. They gave us our box of gloves, and when we finished it, we got another one.

Now that all this is happening, when we should have the same rules, we don’t. They were limiting gloves. They were giving us only three pairs per night. They recently gave me a regular box, but I’m not sure how long they’re expecting me to make it last.  

They haven’t given us masks. The masks I’m using, I’ve had to buy to protect myself.

My boss also told us once that we should smell the disinfectant liquid to disinfect our body from the inside, which seems crazy to me. I don’t do that.

[Total Quality, the company Hernandez works for, tells DCist the company has never had a policy restricting access to gloves and they began distributing cloth masks two weeks ago. Regarding the disinfectant advice, vice president of business development Jack Kellerstrass says he “can’t imagine [this claim] is true in any way.”]

Are there ways that people can make your life or job easier?

There are a lot of people who undervalue cleaning staff. With all this, I want people who have the privilege of working from their homes to see the sacrifice that we custodians are making. And not just us, also the nurses, doctors, and everyone who has to work outside. We are all working together, for the same cause.

We have a risky job in these times. I want them to try to value the janitors a bit more. Thanks to the cleaners, they can arrive peacefully to their work areas, knowing everything is under control and that we’ve tried to do the best job we can.

What is your typical day like?

Since this all started, we have a very disorganized schedule. My kids are doing their classes during the day, and I have my own schedule at night.

My work schedule is from 6 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. I have my own car—but if I didn’t, the situation would be quite hard right now. Now that there’s no traffic, it takes me half an hour to drive to D.C. from Silver Spring.

When we arrive at work, the first thing that happens is our supervisor calls everyone and gives a talk about COVID-19 and what we should do to keep ourselves safe. Every day. It’s a new regulation the company has instituted to give us information.

[Total Quality says that this is not a regulation, but that the company has tried from the beginning to give its employees all necessary information to keep them safe.]

And after that, each person goes to their workplace, and we are required to check whether a lawyer is working in the building [to ensure social distancing]. And then we start disinfecting things: windows, ceiling, walls, suites, desks, everything that’s inside of the office, we disinfect it. The work is divided by floor: I do an entire floor, including bathrooms, kitchens, offices.

There’s a half hour break at 10 p.m. I bring lunch from home. Before all this happened, my coworkers and I each brought things to share. Now we don’t. We can’t. Everyone eats what they brought.

When my shift is over, I drive the half hour back to Silver Spring. Sometimes it takes me a little longer than that, because I give a colleague a ride to his house in Prince George’s County. He doesn’t have transportation. It’s a risk, but we both wear masks in the car.

I get home and do a few things, wash some dishes my kids left out, and maybe watch a bit of television. I go to sleep around 2:30 or 2:45 a.m.

I wake up at 5 or 6 a.m.—my youngest daughter sleeps with me and she wakes me up to tell me she’s hungry. After making breakfast, I go back and rest a bit. My son, he helps me a lot. He looks after his sister and sometimes makes her food, because I need to rest.

After breakfast, I sleep until maybe 11 a.m. When my kids are in school, I can stay asleep longer. But I don’t get a lot of sleep with this schedule.

How has your family been affected by your work?

It’s panic-inducing for everyone to go out onto the street. I only leave my house to go to work, and then straight back to my house. I buy groceries once every two weeks.

My 8-year-old daughter, she’s the most vulnerable to all these things. She started leaving little papers all over the apartment reminding everyone to wash their hands and use hand sanitizer. She put a bottle of hand sanitizer in the doorway of her room, and wrote a little note that says anyone who wants to enter should wash their hands with soap and water first, and then also use the hand sanitizer.

My children have asked me many times to stop going to work because I could get sick and I could die. My youngest has asked me, “Mami, what would we do if you died?” The youngest one is the one who really shows her emotions and her fears. The older ones feel embarrassed. She’s the one who asks me, “who’s going to take care of me if you die?”

It’s the kind of thing that one doesn’t have an answer for. I have to go out and work. There’s no choice.

I tell her, “Mami has to go out and work because someone has to support the household, and in our case, it’s me.” I don’t have the luxury of staying at home, because what would we live on? The bills don’t stop coming. One has to survive. One has to have faith that God will keep us safe from the evil in the street.

But even though my daughter believes in God, and she prays a lot, the fear doesn’t leave her. After all this started, she doesn’t want to sleep alone. She wakes up at night from nightmares. And I tell her, “It’s going to be okay. We have to have faith that this will pass.”