COVID-19 Update
Life in Walvis Bay changed after it was singled out to spend another week in Lock Down due to the truck driver that sneaked out of quarantine. On Monday the 8th, the whole town was holding it’s breath to see if the lock down will be extended.
Not only was the lock down extended for two more weeks until the 22nd of June, the entire Erongo region is now included. Quite a few people are really upset about this move. Businesses are failing everywhere, and people are becoming quite desperate.
The actual number of cases in Namibia has been incredibly low, and not a single death yet. To date, there has been 31 reported cases, of which 16 has recovered. One can only wonder how long the lock down will last, and whether it will be extended to the rest of the country.
Daily Life in the lock down
Life now sounds like the introvert’s dream. A little light reading, maybe some little odd job here and there from the honey do list, walking in the desert. It does get a little old, though. To pass the time a lot of computer games have been played.
My personal pass time is Oolite, an open source remake of the classic space trading flight simulator, Elite. One runs around various galaxies, trading goods from one planet to another, defending yourself from pirates and generally enjoying nice scenery.
Aiden and Ethen are more into Minecraft, which they play cooperatively on the two computers. I have a feeling that pretty soon I will have to buy another computer to have any time on my own.
Admittedly, I do spend quite a bit of time on social media. It’s interesting to see what life is like across the border in South Africa, and the rest of the world. Life in America seems to be a bit harder as there are riots and loads of tension. Europe & China seems to be the only ones that really has a handle on life at this point.
Film services expansion
I have been working a little on expanding the profile of film services of Awesome Chapters. Since there is not much work happening in that direction, I have been writing a blog post about each of the films that we helped with in the last year.
Hopefully that will show up in some search results. It was fun looking back on the work, too! Last week I was working on the art film by Tom Snelgrove. The next one I want to fully write a report about will be the France 5 production, Les Rutes L`Impossibles – Namibie
Marketing
So far I am still working on getting Awesome Chapters more visible on the internet. It’s tough standing out in a crowd. There are plenty of tricks to boost your search rankings, but in the end it will be humans reading your work, so the best strategy is to give people something to look at and enjoy.
So, I am continuing the daily picture on Facebook to boost visibility. This week the theme has been mostly animals, and mostly from Etosha. Funnily enough, people seem to respond better to dunes, but I don’t want to overdo that angle. 🙂
With the pandemic, people are spending more time on the internet, when not relaxing with a good book. A trip to Etosha sounds awesome now. Most of Namibia is open for business, after all. One just has to wonder when life for the humans of the country will return back to normal.
