Monthly Archives: March 2020

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Physical distancing, Social Togetherness #LockDownSA Day 5

Day 5 LockDown

31 March 2020

1 326 cases
Recovered: 31
Deceased: 3

Working from home seems like a dream come true, but in reality it comes with a plethora of challenges. First and foremost my twins. They are not used to being at home all the time, and certainly not having mommy at home all to themselves all the time. They are demanding, noisy, playful and want attention. All. The. Time.

It is challenging to call clients with loud children’s voices in the background. I am struggling to hear my clients, and the twins don’t understand when I am busy on the phone, I am working. They want to be part of the conversation. “Mommy, who are you talking to?”

It is challenging to work on my machines – the twins want to type on the keyboard, watch anything on either my phone or youtube, and generally don’t want me in the office at all. At home usually means playtime or storytime, and they just don’t get the shifted routine.

It is challenging to focus to do research for ourselves, on behalf of clients, on current solutions, on future solutions, on any solutions. The twins are relentless in their pursuit of my time, and my attention.

Then, my cats and dogs. Not as challenging – the cats at least are pretty soundless and I’ve now confined them to the catio, but the barking! Between the twins shouting and the dogs barking, I am trying to find a way to have conference meetings that have some sort of structure to them.

It is very challenging to have to go out (have now been out twice, feeling very badass and as if I need a German Shepherd by my side, and a stick of some sort), because I have never gone out without taking the twins with me, and now I have to leave them behind, tearful and angry at me.

Last night our President addressed us again as a nation. He looks tired, but he is strong in his resolve. He pleads that we stick to the lockdown rules, that we hold the line. In our country, although some of us have been staying home for longer than lockdown (our children’s school closed some time ago already, and I’ve only been going out when necessary since then), our government payouts only happened yesterday, which means our actual countrywide lockdown only started today. Privilege is even more apparent now than ever, and it is heartbreaking.

The Covid-19 spread is growing exponentially, which is really really hard to understand because of the speed at which it grows. The best way the mind-boggling figures make sense to me, is when I think of an old fable I read many years ago. I found a recent explanation of it here. A great emperor offered the inventor of chess any reward that he wanted. The inventor asked that a single grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, and so on. Doubling each time. The king, baffled by such a small price for a wonderful game, immediately agreed, and ordered the treasurer to pay the agreed upon sum. A week later, the inventor went before the king and asked why he had not received his reward. The king, outraged that the treasurer had disobeyed him, immediately summoned him and demanded to know why the inventor had not been paid. The treasurer explained that the sum could not be paid – by the time you got even halfway through the chessboard, the amount of grain required was more than the entire kingdom possessed. So initially, Covid-19 infection figures look deceptively small, but with exponential growth, it is tough to guess which way the graph is going. Here’s a pretty cool video that illustrates how it works.

And then lastly for today, there’s this:

The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks.

 

I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.

We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.

As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that.

First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do.

You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days.

You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it.

You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy.

You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…

You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest.

Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.

You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again.

You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training.

You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all.

You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules.

You will count all the things you do not need.

The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.

Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant.

Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month?

You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.

You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.

Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.

Many children will be conceived.

Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.

Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.

You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.

You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.

At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.

You will eat again.

We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

© Francesca Melandri 2020

 

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Physical distancing, Social Togetherness #LockDownSA Day 4

Day 4 LockDown

30 March 2020

1280 cases
Recovered: 31
Deceased: 2

I find myself musing who came up with the term “lockdown”. It is a word I have never come across before that I know of, and I read fairly extensively. It feels strange to look out of the windows of our home and know that we cannot just go outside of our property. When I try to visualise the word “lockdown” I see a huge padlock and a chain, across our doors, our windows, our gates.

The world is holding its breath collectively, with everything set on pause. To me, it feels as if I am wading through molasses, unable to move quickly. My movements are languid, calculated, constrained. I am asked questions online, and I cannot come up with answers that make sense to me.

Yesterday Thomas Schaefer, the finance minister of Germany’s Hesse state, committed suicide. Apparently after he became “deeply worried” over how to cope with the economic fallout from the coronavirus. My heart breaks for him and every other person who has to deal with so much worry right now.

I find myself increasingly worrying about people who are alone during this time. I also worry about people unable to shop for themselves for essentials. The delivery services are overloaded, with some food services only able to deliver in about a week, and even more. What about people who do not have money for food, or who just cannot get to a store at all? I created a whatsapp group for people who joined who needs someone to chat to or to just check in.

Today I ventured out for the first time since we were asked to stay at home. It was not an easy decision, as my son has a compromised immune system, and I dread bringing anything home that causes harm to my children. We needed fresh fruit and vegetables, some milk and a couple more items. Doesn’t seem like much, but we really needed it, and for love or money I couldn’t find someone who could deliver to us.

Obviously we’ve been trying to explain what Covid-19 is to the twins, because they needed to understand why they cannot go to school, visit their friends, or go out. My son started crying this morning when I waved a cheery goodbye, convinced I was going to die. I was wearing my (what I thought was compulsory when we go to the grocery store) face mask, and we put clean clothes and sanitiser by the front door for when I got back. The new normal… It took a while to calm him down and tell him people are not dying, they are just sick, and I don’t want the germs to come home with me. I couldn’t remember which side of the face mask goes where, but eventually just put it on, and then realised how hot it gets when worn. So all sweaty-faced (but at least masked) I set out.

Up to when I got to the store, the streets were fairly quiet. At the store, though, it was as if everything was back to normal. Very few people wore masks, and the recommended 1m distance between customers was completely disregarded. Yellow lines at the cash registers served as a distance guide. Although there were people complaining about price hikes online with photos of products and prices, at this store prices seemed pretty normal to me, the only “strange” was that there were complete shelves stripped bare. Especially in the cold meats, frozen veg and baking sections. And the deli section for precooked meals was not operational, and no cold meats sliced on demand. There was no sign of cordoned off aisles with so-called prohibited goods. I got most of what we needed, could not find spaghetti anywhere and apparently yeast is currently worth its weight in gold and as unobtainable as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Back home, changed clothes at front door, sanitised everything, at my desk trying to work. What will this first full week of lockdown bring? I choose to be positive – we are doing out best, and that is all we can do.

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Physical distancing, Social Togetherness #LockDownSA Day 3

Day 3 LockDown

29 March 2020

1187 cases
Recovered: no new figures yet
Deceased: 1(Western Cape) no new figures yet

Started the day cautiously optimistic, with today only 17 cases more than yesterday in our country. Only to read that it is not a true reflection of infection, it is only an indication of the numbers that were ready for reporting.

Everywhere online, businesses are begging for continued support, to keep the payment chain going and prevent economic collapse. To prevent staff layoffs and further unemployment. Further disruption of our lives and our future. Quietly, I echo their pleas and hope for the best, thinking of ways that we can continue existing for the sake of the people who work for us and their families.

There is so much good being written about. Neighbours waving and shouting encouragement to each other across the streets, the 7pm initiative where we all walk out of our front doors and clap for our services sector, our medical personnel, our emergency employees. Every person on the frontline exposing themselves so that we can stay home and be protected. People leaving tinned food out on dustbin or refuse collection day to share.

There is so much negativity on the other hand. Last night was Earth Hour, and we did an encouraging post on most of our clients’ social media platforms. Only to have angry comments in the line of this is the last crap people need. So much anger and frustration and lashing out at something innocent. Also still so much arrogance of the untouchables who still disobey the regulations. To what end, I wonder? Only to make all of this worse for all of us?

Life has become a BEFORE and AFTER. There was a time where I would, without a thought, quickly dash out to the shop to buy whatever we needed, be it for a meal or to fix something around the house or for a project or the office. Now it is a matter of planning around delivery times. And whether what I want to buy is actually on the list of what is allowed. There was a time where, if the kids got antsy, I would drive them to the bike park where I’d sit and read while they practiced cycling. Or we’d go for a picnic at the Botanical Gardens. Or we’d go hang at the mall or at their favourite restaurants. Now I have to think around activities for them that we can do at home. And with items we actually have. Without resorting to too much television time, because I am worried about the consequences.

The world has quieted down. There is no laughter in the streets, no cars driving close to us. I hear that elsewhere in town traffic is not really dwindling, but here in our corner, it is as if we are on an island of quiet. My children are the center of the universe that brings calm to my world. They keep me busy in so many ways that I appreciate, because otherwise my overactive mind goes places where it really doesn’t need to go.

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Physical distancing, Social Togetherness #LockDownSA Day 2

Day 2 LockDown

28 March 2020

1170 cases
Recovered: 5
Deceased: 1(Western Cape)

 

Today started a bit darkly for me. I woke up well ahead of my usual time, and couldn’t see the point of getting up. Day 2, with the number two perfectly representative of how I feel.

Probably the best way to describe my general state of mind is ambivalence. These are challenging times, more so because our expenses are not stopping and we have so many people dependent on us. I am not sure how I feel about any of this. I oscillate between an optimistic and cheery: We’ve got this! to a very dark and pessimistic: We’re going to go under, lose everything and die.

It is hard to not follow the news, because I need to know what is going on so that I can make the correct decisions for my business and assist our clients. For instance yesterday government issued a gazette that boils down to every website with a domain name that ends in .za – from government portals to private blogs – must now link to the government’s main Covid-19 page on its front page. No indication on when compliance deadline is, just get it done.

Online is a bad place to be right now. There are articles about thousands of people in various areas of our country not complying. People are happily cycling, jogging, travelling, visiting, going to the beach… as if this is business as usual. Our armed forces and the police have their hands full to get people to just do the one simple thing asked of us: stay home. On the other hand there are photos and footage of streets in major cities without a single car or person in sight.

This morning I woke up to three pieces of very bad news: EdCon may have to close its doors after lockdown (Edgars, etc – all those people, without jobs), Moody’s downgraded our status as a country to junk, and our connectivity is an issue again. We have so many challenges are business owners right now, just to stay alive and kicking. It breaks my heart that so many of us are doing what we are supposed to be doing: staying put. Our businesses are hanging on by threads and we do what we can. We all want lockdown to be over and as many people as possible to be safe. Yet the sheer arrogance of a sector of our population is going to worsen everything before it gets better, and lockdown may very well be extended.

At home, my toddler twins are climbing out the walls. They’ve not known so many days indoors in their entire little lives. I’ve always made a point of outdoor activities, and spoils and picnics and roadtrips. They want to see their friends. My daughter wants to do ballet, it is all she’s been talking about for two days now. My son wants to play soccer and go cycle. After they decided to vandalise the neighbours backyard yesterday, I am reluctant to let them outside without supervision, and I have to work most of the day, so their outdoor time is shrinking. What memories will they live with because of these times?

The new norm is to wake up in the morning, kick my own behind just to get started. Sort out the twins, get to my desk, get my work done. Stay positive. Freak out on my own, so nobody sees it. Calm down our housekeeper, who moved in with us because she felt unsafe in Thembalethu, and frankly, because it is the right thing to do. Cook/bake something from scratch for our little household. Make/craft something with the twins. Check our provisions, order the necessary online. Put on mask, gloves, sanitise card machine, pay. Come back inside, wipe down groceries, pack away. Try not to incessantly stress eat all. the. time. We are going to be fine.

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Physical distancing, Social Togetherness #LockDownSA Day 1

Day 1 LockDown

27 March 2020

927 cases (218 new confirmed cases) from stats of 26 March (no new final stats yet)
Recovered: 5
Deceased: 1 (Western Cape)

Woke up this morning with a heavy queasiness in my stomach, threatening to spill over into my mouth. That feeling you get when you are writing your finals at university, but you opted to stay out with your friends the night before because “you’ve got this” and now you realise that, in fact, you don’t.

Are we physically prepared for lockdown? Who knows – I hope so. We have a secure home. We have food, but not all we need – I went out to buy some staples yesterday because I didn’t want to stockpile, thinking of all the thousands of other people who also need to shop. But the shelves were glaringly empty, with a sad limp lettuce in the one corner at the bottom in a crate, and fluorescent lights highlighting the lack. We are lucky, I can try online for some eggs, milk, yoghurt, fresh vegetables.

Am I mentally prepared for lockdown? Probably better than most. I have always been a bit of an introvert, and am awkward when having to interact with people for any length of time. But even I am not prepared for all the feelings. Fear, anxiety, insecurity, sadness. I understand most of my emotions, but why this overwhelming sadness with tears sitting just behind my eyes, and a constant conscious effort to not break down crying?

I think it is because my mind keeps on straying to our townships, where the children may not have access to food, the elderly to care. Where 8 – 12 people live in a tin shack with no space to hoard food, even if they did have the money to. With the relentless sun beating down on these roofs, no fences between the houses, nowhere to go. Where people can no longer come out to actually earn their daily bread, because there is nobody to allow them to do it. God knows, I know this is the right thing to do, but I also know the vulnerable will be the first to suffer.

The voices in my head are oscillating between calming me down and freaking me out. The what ifs and the that won’t happens, coupled with the already present anxiety are not helping. Does everyone have this dichotomy between “all will be well”, and “no it won’t be”? I hope so, because otherwise I am already certifiable.

Some of my fears are completely groundless, and irrational. I realise this morning I forgot to bring the printer from the office, and I also don’t have any paper. That means… printing no activities for the twins to do. No printing of worksheets, recipes, or whatever my busy mind can come up with to print. Why is this irrational? We are a digital company and household – I haven’t actually used a printer myself for over two years. My children have more than enough to occupy them. There are children who has nothing during this time.

There is no cake flour in the house to bake if I felt at any point to bake an impromptu cake. Irrational, because I have never in my life baked a cake. I wouldn’t know where to start – I know it has something to do with flour, eggs and oil. Even cookies, the once I tried, were an absolute disaster – my cookie dough was runny and I kept on adding Maizena to get it to thicken up, and what I eventually got were misshapen dinosaur-y shapes that tasted very strange and I couldn’t even get the dogs to eat, let alone the children.

The twins asked to go play outside while I worked at my home office. With a trampoline, a ball pit and a covered swimming pool, I thought it’s a great idea. Some fresh air, a bit of activity, what could go wrong? Minutes later, the neighbours call me – the twins threw trampoline springs over the wall at their bakkie, denting it. I really don’t even know what to say about this. My little boy has a compromised immune system, so their lockdown started 9 days ago. They are bored, frustrated and need attention and stimulation. They know I am working during the day still, even though it is from home, but they don’t understand why our restaurant treats, road trips, walks and cycling has stopped. Four years old, so little and innocent still. I wish I could just protect them more.

I accessed my social media feeds this morning to get a gauge on the general mood, and right away knew it was a mistake. The public outcry online is so loud that it drowns out my small flame of positivity with a tsunamic wave of negative energy. There is SO. MUCH. ENTITLEMENT. Who are these people? Don’t they understand? There is arrogance, belittling, anger and a general dismissive attitude from a large number of people that makes me realise we are not all accepting of what is the right thing to do. And my fear is the sheer ignorance (sorry, there really is no other word) of these people is going to make it worse for all of us. Someone said it perfectly: We are fighting two pandemics at the same time; Covid-19 and Stupidity.

Unbelievably, there are apparently people who are letting their gardeners come to work (apparently this is acceptable because they use their own bicycles for transport). Although there was a clear directive against jogging, some are pounding the streets, attired in their sweats and running shoes, because the rules don’t apply to them. I watched youtube footage of police loading transgressors into their vans who were drinking at shebeens/taverns/pubs in Hillbrow last night.

My people, three weeks is a blink of an eye in the bigger scheme of things. This is hard, it is already hard. And it is harder on so many more people than we can imagine. But by not obeying the rules, we will not flatten the curve, and this will carry on longer, with more losses, than it needs to.

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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Still reeling from our country going into a lockdown because of the Corona Virus and not 100% sure how I feel about this, so excuse the rambling of an incoherent mind trying to stabilise its thoughts.

This year… Wow, what a ride it’s been. Kicked off January cautiously optimistic after what I considered a devastating 2019, going into this new decade with hope. And BANG!!

I shared this meme somewhere in the beginning of the year, with a side snicker of humour (because how else do we cope with disaster?). We cried with Australia about the sad sad countless deaths of innocent animals, we incredulously watched some world leaders making political decisions that affected world markets and currencies very negatively.

The world watched the whole Megxit saga, again with appropriate visuals and much of a muchness, divided between two camps: “how could they” and a “how dare we judge them” – both pretty vocal about their stance, while I bemusedly wondered how we can get so passionate about people we do not know at all, except for what we read about them. Mostly written by biased, jaded people who will turn to any angle to ensure the next paycheck.

And then… rumours started with a couple of posts about some flu in China that’s been getting steadily worse since December. Next minute, a massive hospital was built in 6 days (pretty much how long it took our Creator to build the planet), Wuhan was on lockdown, and we were fearing for the safety of many people we know that teach English to children in that city.

Still, we felt untouchable. We watched the virus spread and the world map bleeding red around the major cities. Here, in the isolated hamlet of George, what could possibly happen? It all seemed like a post-apocalyptic movie unfolding…… somewhere else. Especially when the W.H.O. declared a global health emergency at the end of January.

Everything became a bit more real when the first ten passengers arrived in South Africa from Italy, and one man tested positive. Still – Gauteng is practically on the other side of the world, it is so far from us.

And now, here we are. Three months after the virus was identified, a country under a 21-day lockdown to try to flatten the curve so that our health services are not overwhelmed by the influx of patients needing care.

As a business owner, I have very mixed feelings about all of this. I fear for my staff members. My company is 19 years old this year. We’ve weathered two recessions, currently in the middle of our third one. Loadshedding, fluctuating markets, constant reinvention and retraining to offer the latest best services to our clients, financial losses, and so much more.

Online is the worst place to be at the moment. I tear up reading posts by people who live under the breadline and who lost their jobs. Close to us, people were retrenched, with no hope of finding alternate employment right now. There are bills to pay, children to feed, day to day expenses.

What about the homeless? The elderly? The young children who got their only meal a day from the school they attended?

I understand the lockdown is necessary. I agree with it with every fibre of my being. I am just so worried about how we will look as a country, as survivors, when we come out of this.

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MomDay to SomeDay 2

In these days of self-isolation and keeping the kids at home, I find that the challenges are becoming more and more as boredom sets in (on the side of the twins, not mine. I love boredom. Who doesn’t love boredom? Boredom is great!)

Especially around mealtimes, getting new meal ideas and getting them to just. eat. their. food…..

So Mom, you’re not alone – I wrote this little post – you’re welcome to add your own actions in the comments section.

Parenting toddlers especially around meal times is like a full-time mission:
Begging: Please eat your food
Bribery: If you eat your food all up, you can have some ice-cream
Threats: There will be no ice cream if you do not finish your food
Interrogation: Why won’t you eat your food?
Shaming: There are hungry children in India/Africa/…..
Negotiation: If you eat only those bits, it’s ok
Self-doubt: Is there something wrong with the food I made?
Surrender: Fine! Staaaaarrrveee!!