Social safety nets, community spirit help South African mother through Covid-19 crisis

Around 40 km outside Cape Town, Leebah Bessick wipes sweat from her forehead as she digs a pitchfork into the earth at a neighbourhood community garden. It’s an unseasonably hot day here at Blackheath Secondary School and even a shady corner of the garden offers Bessick and the other gardeners little respite from the midday sun.
Still, she finds refuge here these days after enduring a year of hardship and unemployment caused by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit South Africans hard.