There seems to not be anyone who truly knew how long the COVID-19 pandemic would last … not even the health care world.

So, you can forgive Flavia Nazareth for how she saw it. For the last seven years, Flavia has run Little Blank Canvas, an art school in High Point. Like any business owner, she wanted to keep all of her clientele healthy and safe so she looked for other ways to teach for a while.

“I thought it would last just a few weeks,” Flavia says. “So, I call everybody, we were able to pretty fast transition to doing online classes.”

But, as she says, she planned on that for only a few weeks – she wanted the students back in her brick-and-mortar school. She held on as long as she could.

“And then, October 1st, I just had to make that most difficult decision to let go of the space,” she says.

Her school was closed, for now, and she was still of the mind that it would be a short duration.

“I was truly hopeful that this was it, we’re going to get through this and this is going to be OK,” says Flavia.

But, here we are, 10 months into the pandemic with no definite way out yet in sight. And it causes pain beyond business. Flavia and her husband, Phillip, were both born and raised in Brazil so they don’t have much family in America. It was always a highlight of the year when Flavia’s side of the family would visit during the holidays. But, again, not this year.

“It’s tough on us because, of course, we miss it but we understand emotionally, as well,” says Flavia. “But, Olivia, Christmas Eve in the morning, she came crying and saying, ‘I miss Mama, I miss my grandma, I wish they were here.’ But, thank God, we have technology so, we set up our computers, we had everybody on Zoom.”

Meet the Nazareth family and see the Little Blank Canvas Art Studio in this Project 2021 profile.