Phumelele Umtawana is a home for severely disabled children of varying ages in the heart of Mnaguzi, KwaZulu-Natal. This home is run by exceptional ladies who own only R200 a month and they feed and bath them in a home that is greatly underfunded. Proper ramps for wheelchairs are non-existent and there are very little resources for any kind of education or learning.
Therapy On Wheels give a helping hand twice a week where we do some exercises with resistance bands, dance and listen to music, draw, provide massage therapy and play games that develop coordination and motor skills.
The smiles are enough to brighten any day and Phumelele Umtwana has a special place in our hearts.
The benefits of exercise are endless and the positivity it has created in these areas are easy to see. Participants walk great lengths to get to halls with no fans or circulation, or sand fields in 35 degrees celsius twice a week in order to attend our health and wellness sessions. Even the Therapy On Wheels vehicle has to be parked far away behind a secure gate as it is an infamous hijacking area.
Weight has been lost and muscles have been gained in sessions that include resistance band training and aerobic exercises and a lot of laughs in exercise positions that aren’t very familiar to the community. After a month interest has grown immensely and there are a good number of volunteers who we will train in the coming weeks to do what we do in these sessions once we have left.
Each individual has also received a free resistance band to continue their exercises at home.
Cerebral Palsy is a congenital disorder of movement, muscle tone or posture and is due to abnormal brain development, often before birth and cannot be cured.
2 days after arriving in Kosi Bay we met the lovely Nosipho in Manguzi on a pavilion in front of a Standard Bank and we immediately had a connection with her. She works for Sileti-Temba, a charity that helps CP caregivers in the area. She introduced us to Mazwi and Tami, 16 – and 7 year old CP boys living in their remote homesteads, 40 km from the nearest hospital.
Mazwi is 16 and can walk and understand but has severely rigid limbs and involuntary motions. He used to be in a wheelchair but nowadays he is walking to the tuck shop full of confidence to buy his favourite tomato chips, as evident by his red finger tips every Monday and Wednesday.
Mazi lives with his mother, aunt, older brother and 2 smaller cousins on a spacious homestead where the chickens were just as interested in therapy as Mazwi and his family.
We spent 2 hours a week with Mazwi doing stretches, motor skills exercises, massage therapy, strength exercises and household chores such as hanging up laundry. He improved a lot over the course of 2 months and he especially reacted well to massage therapy.
Tami is a 7 year old boy whose smile will brighten your day. He lives in an extremely remote area 30 minute walk to the nearest main road and over 50km to the hospital. He lives with his lovely mother, twin sisters and Gogo.
We trained Tami’s very enthusiastic mother how to use stretches and the resistance band to give Tami his daily therapy. Tami spends most of his time in a wheelchair or crawling around his homestead. His left side gets severely rigid and some sessions his left hand can barely open out of his permanent fist. We wish we could see Tami more as this is a critical period for him to hopefully be able to walk to the tuck shop like Mazwi because his wheelchair can never make it on the thick sand roads that lead to his house.
This is why we started Therapy On Wheels, to give people in remote areas a fair chance to live a normal life by giving them their right to therapy.
Working with little children is very rewarding, but also very challenging. Not even the fittest can live up to their energy levels. Therapy On Wheels worked with 2 schools in the Manguzi and Tembe area and keeping up with our main sustainability goal we trained the teachers to provide structured, scientific and organised PE classes.
The teachers were very enthusiastic about us being there and helping out and by the final week they were leading the classes themselves with the knowledge and programs that we provided for them.
Therapy On Wheels believes that it is important for children to understand from a very young age the benefits that exercise can have on a person. We spent an hour a week at these schools and through organised chaos, got a few of these learners to fall in love with exercise
Gogo is Zulu for grandmother, and that is exactly the connection that we felt with these ladies after 2 months.
Gathering on the last Monday of each month, these Gogo’s all suffer from some form of osteoarthritis. Some of these Gogo’s arrive at Mahlungulu Clinic from a far with a taxi just for these sessions. After meeting with the PT of these sessions we realised that these ladies need more than one session a month. Therapy On Wheels made it possible for these Gogo’s to have a session every Monday and attendance grew by the week. They loved singing while exercising under a tree in the Kosi Bay summer sun. We gave each Gogo a resistance band and they now have the opportunity to do exercises every day at their respective homesteads.
2 months and 9 sessions later we built a real bond with the Gogo’s and it was a sad goodbye, but we left knowing that they now can exercise more regularly and relieve some severe pain that they suffer from in their daily lives.