Today, the South African restaurant industry participated in a nationwide demonstration called “One Million Seats in the Streets”, to protest the government’s treatment of the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 lockdown. The hashtag for the movement is #JobsSaveLives.

This morning I visited the Melville food parcel program for the first time in two weeks, and things have changed significantly at the distribution. The entire operation has been moved outside the church, due to the recent surge in coronavirus cases, and the volunteers are now wearing bright red hazmat suits.

After blogging mostly every day for the first 100 days of South Africa’s COVID-19 lockdown, I took a full week off. This is weird. It feels like I’ve been gone for ages.

Many people in South Africa have been writing about Day 100 on social media, posting montages of photos, reflecting on what’s happened over the past three-plus months, etc. I don’t want to be redundant or overdo it. But this day does feel quite momentous for me, as it does for so many others. I truly don’t feel like the same person I was 100 days ago, in the same way the world doesn’t feel like the same place it was 100 days ago.

I’ve been working out with George Khosi at the Hillbrow Boxing Club for many years. Up until the lockdown started I’d been going to Hillbrow about three times a week, every week, since 2012.

It’s Day 98 of the South African lockdown, which I literally cannot believe. Earlier today I suddenly thought back to my Day 9 post, when I said it felt like Day 900 and questioned my decision to blog every day of lockdown because I suspected it might last longer than 21 days. Ha! Hahahaha!

But today is Day 97 of the lockdown, which means it’s been 100 days since I started this Lockdown Journal. (I started the journal three days before the lockdown started.) I just counted up all my posts and I’ve blogged on 88 out of the past 100 days. (I took weekends off after Day 50.)

Today, after a week or so of procrastination, I returned to the Aranda blanket factory in Randfontein. After my previous Basotho blanket post, a reader in America sent me a donation to buy blankets for the blanket drive my friend Kennedy is organizing. So I had to pick up a few more.