Lindokuhle SobekwaDeath of George Floyd, 2020
Lockdown 2020
My family and I live in a squatter camp, where small shacks are crowded into one small area.There is not enough space to move, let alone to social distance. Water is from shared taps and this is a real problem. We do not have enough taps for everyone. Washing hands regularly is a challenge. People work very hard to get electricity. Recently there was a protest over service delivery and large rocks were thrown onto the main road and it was forced to close to traffic. The people who live in the squatter camps are facing serious difficulties with accessing electricity and they are resorting to connecting illegally. They can only connect at night because during the day the police will arrest them if they get caught.
The lockdown has been a very difficult process for many of the families in my community, both for those who are unemployed, and also those who are employed, because when the lockdown was extended some people got letters of retrenchment. The people who hustle by selling in the streets have been stopped because of Covid-19 restrictions. There is a manufacturing company called Brit that used to produce bricks in my community. The factory closed a few years ago and people have recently started going to this place to collect bricks, either to reuse them or to resell them as a means to put food on the table. Most of the people that live here work in a local industrial area called Alrode. Almost all of the manufacturing companies in that area had to close
due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions. Other people work in retail shops; many of these shops don’t sell essential goods so most of these people are stuck home with no source of income.
Electricity continues to be a problem, something that keeps taking people a step back from any progress they might make. The biggest downfall of this on and off electricity is that people have to throw food away because of spoilage as their fridge has been off for five days or more. People who were retrenched from their work are all looking forward to receiving food parcels that have been promised.
Despite this, much of life still carries on as normal. Not everyone can afford a mask or hand sanitizer. Those who do own masks reuse them multiple times because they don’t have money to buy more. Proper sanitation continues to be a big issue. In my community, we still use a bucket system for the latrines. Every Friday the sanitation
