#Covid-19

It’s Monday, January 11th, 2021. It’s dark and rainy in Joburg and the holidays are officially over. South Africa is suffering through a second wave of covid-19 – worse than the first wave, as many experts predicted, and likely to worsen further as millions of South Africans return to work in the big cities after celebrating the holidays at home. We’re back in Level 3 lockdown, with a strict curfew and alcohol sales banned again.

Remember that time I published a blog post every day for 100 days, and I had nothing to post except flowers and cats but you all enjoyed it anyway? (Or maybe you just read it anyway because you had nothing better to do?)

This is a quick post to announce the Melville Food Program, which I’ve blogged about many times during lockdown (see here and here and here), did its last large-scale food parcel distribution at Heritage Baptist Church today. This amazing group of volunteers, led by Tanya and Sean Gardiner, have given out more than 5,400 food parcels (around 300,000 total meals) to Melville area residents over the past four months.

When the pandemic first hit and South Africa locked down, the closure of Emmarentia Dam and the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens (two parks that are essentially one – I will refer to the whole thing as “Emmarentia” going forward) was one of my greatest sources of sadness. Emmarentia is my favorite park to run and walk in, and while several other Joburg parks (Delta Park, the Melville Koppies, James and Ethel Gray) remained unofficially open during Level 4 and Level 3, Emmarentia was firmly closed.

I haven’t blogged about the lockdown for a couple of weeks, and I feel like I’ve built up all these lockdown thoughts and ideas but haven’t been able to share them. So here they are, in no particular order.