Kwadabeka-Clermont Home visit reflection

Dear Reader

Please be kindly infromed that this has been a great academic year so far for me.  I am currently doing my Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) block at a place called Kwadabeka in Durban South Africa. This is one of the most exciting modules in my life as it allows you as an occupational therapy student to interact with the communities directly on day to day basis. It also allows you to get an experience of communiy service and also allows for robust engagement with critical issues that affect thwe the communities at large.

Home visits so far have stood out to be the best experience for me so far. As an occupational therapist, there is an emphasis on to holistically treat the client as whole which includes his family and his home environment. Home visits thus covers all these aspects as the assessments, treatment and programme planning is dealt with it within the confines of the person involved in therapy. As a therapist you get to assess all the Activities of daily living (ADL's) and using the equipment and materials that the person uses at their homes.

The home is the most comfortable environment for the individual since they are used to it and are able to converse freely without any intimidation or fear, hence making easier access to intervention for both the therapist and the persons family.

Looking forward to send you more fun and crazy stuff that is happening within our new community of KwaDabeka.

Regards

The Classes of Society in the KwaDabeka area

Having spent more than a week at the KwaDabeka-Clermont Township and observing most corners of the township, I have made a conclusion that our society is not the same and miraculous intervention is needed to bridge the societal gap between the so called rich and poor class. The area is characterised by different types of individuals who are living unique lives and who are affected by different challenges and problems.  One challenge that is almost a burden to all communities in Africa if not the whole world is unemployment. This challenge has led to more than two billion people in the world living under a dollar in a day. The KwaDabeka- Clermont is also victim to this pandemic that is increasingly affecting each and every one each day.

Across the Clermont clinic there is a blue container whereby homeless people and those who have no food to eat, gather and are served soup and bread.  Every day when I look at those people I ask myself one question (which I think is common to all of us), Will this world be a better place for all of us one?  Well I do not think an answer will come in our life time; however as an advocate for change it is just fair for me to bother myself with those questions even if I will not get answers eventually.  Well thanks to St Clements church Clermont that has seen a need to feed these hungry men, women and children without expecting any gains from the government and where so ever but doing out of love and being directed by compassion ministry.

Having observed those people for more than a week, I see one common thing in their faces and that is grief. Most of them enjoy the food they eat because they hungry (even though the food does not look appetising to me) but deep inside they think about where they will sleep for the day and if their family members have had something to eat for the day. After scrutinising all that I then think about their occupations for the day, I mean these are normal human beings and they should have daily occupations like anyone else.  Most of them come in the morning for breakfast, eat and sit under the tree near the container waiting for lunch. It is not surprising that even after lunch you find those people there and I assume they stay there until dinner.  Learnt helplessness has become an order of the day and they do not feel they can do something to improve their lives or those of their loved ones (we need to come in here as Occupational therapist).

Are these people lazy to work, I ask myself.  I then quickly realise that most of these fellow South African citizens have spent more than 10 years in search of jobs in the industrial areas of West mead, New Germany and all parts of Pinetown.  They are no longer motivated to even wake up to those gates with barbed wires at the top and a foreman on the other side pointing only 10 people who will do temporary work for that day out of a possible 450 people in one gate. 

Is this what the world is supposed to be?  Is this what God wants the world to be?  Why are there classes in one society? I ask myself.

 Sensory wall @ R.P Moodley school

 

 

 

Visual Schedules pic.

 

Browns School Versus Clermont Day-Care Centre

24/02/2014

Browns school is a special school for the disabled children from the junior year to main stream level; it was established to cater for the needs of disabled children throughout the EThekwini district and KZN as a whole. The school has about 365 children who are distributed according to the separate grades and according to the age range of the children. The school has about 5 qualified occupational therapists and has a well-established occupational therapy department within the school.

On the 24 February 2014 as the KwaDabeka community group we had gone to a visit to the institution to find out more about the programmes being run by the institution and ideas on how to set up an activity/ sensory wall for the Clermont community health centre (CHC). The programmes were to be used and implemented for the community day care centre within the Clermont clinic facilities.

One must reflect that the trip was successful as we were able to gather valuable information on the program implementation and also many ideas to that can be used to keep the occupational therapy department going for years. The occupational therapists were willing to share everything and were also keen to answer all our questions; they went on to give us a resource file copy which they use to plan their yearly programs. We were also exposed to all kinds of scrap material that is used by the department in making activities and toys for the children.

Even though there was a lot of positive one picked out from the trip, but it was very emotional for me as I compared the facilities they have at browns school and the difficulties faced by the ever stressed mothers at the Clermont day-care centre. The facility has about 6 mothers who have a mammoth task of caring for 35 children with different disabilities and of which most of them they hardly understand. They have no toys, no activities and no structured programmes for the children, hence making their tasks more difficult. 

As an occupational therapist, activist and an advocate for change I have concluded that there is still a long way to go in our country in order to make the lives of all the people living with disabilities better.