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This paper brings together anthropology of uncertainty and gender and education to examine the gendered daily experiences of elementary level teachers in the United States at the onset of the COVID-19 emergency. We found that teachers responded to ongoing uncertainty through various forms of care both at work and home: care for students and their families, their colleagues, their school community, their own families, and when possible, themselves. We argue that this care work served as a key mechanism that teachers used to navigate the uncertainty posed by the pandemic while simultaneously serving as a weight that exacerbated their stress, anxiety, and workload, and ultimately limited their capacity to care for themselves. Additionally, we argue that the care-laden responses of elementary school teachers to this crisis both reflect and reify the particularly gendered ways that women are tasked with the necessary work of nurturing in schools as well as in families. This work makes a theoretical contribution to the literature on education in emergencies by framing the concept of emergency through the lenses of uncertainty and gender. We show how providing education in emergency settings can be a productive process functioning along relational and temporal axes. Furthermore, we shed light on the day-to-day work of teachers in a global health emergency and provide a framework for understanding the immense and often gendered care work they do. Finally, by situating this article in the United States, we seek to highlight the presence of emergencies across the Global North, thereby making a case for extending the concept of emergency within the field of education in emergencies beyond the Global South. By examining early pandemic patterns of intensive care work conducted by teachers, this paper helps to explain the global crisis of teacher burnout and attrition 2 years after the pandemic began and offers insight for those seeking to prevent teacher burnout in the next emergency.

Doum palm (Hyphaene compressa) is a perennial economic plant primarily growing in Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs). It is heavily relied upon for food, animal feed, construction materials and medicine, making it an ideal plant for resource sustainability. However, the limited information on its genetic resources has hindered its breeding and conservation studies. This study used the genotyping by sequencing approach to identify Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. These SNPs were further used to assess the genetic diversity and population structure of 96 H. compressa accessions from Coastal, Northern and Eastern ASAL regions of Kenya using two approaches; reference-based and de novo-based assemblies. STRUCTURE analysis grouped the sampled accessions into two genetic clusters (Cluster 1 and Cluster 2). Cluster 1 included accessions from the Northern region, whereas Cluster 2 included all accessions from Eastern and Coastal regions. Accessions from Kwale (Coastal) had mixed ancestry from both Cluster 1 and Cluster 2. These STRUCTURE findings were further supported by principal components analysis, discriminant analysis of principal components and phylogenetic analysis. Analysis of molecular variance indicated greater genetic variation within populations (92.7%) than among populations (7.3%). An overall FST of 0.074 was observed, signifying moderate genetic differentiation among populations. The results of this study will provide information useful in breeding, marker-assisted selection and conservation management of H. compressa.