DUNOON | JOE SLOVO PARK | WOLVERIVIER | KWA 5 | KILLARNEY GARDENS | MONTAGUE GARDENS | MILNERTON | TABLE VIEW | WITSAND
AUGUST 2016
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She is disabled but independent
Nomandla aims to change lives! PETER LUHANGA
W
hen a thug sent Nomandla Mqamelo flying from the top of a pedestrian bridge, she didn’t realise she would be left paralysed and in a wheelchair for the rest of her life! Nomandla was 16-years-old at the time and in grade 11 at school. She sustained a compression fracture of her spinal cord and has been on a wheelchair ever since that ill-fated day! “They told me I’d never walk again. I cried the whole day. I was confused and young at the time. When I was discharged from the hospital I felt useless. To adapt from being an able bodied person to being disabled was very difficult. i could not even make my own bed,” she said. But she never gave up. “I told myself the first step was to get an education and enrolled in a special needs school in the Eastern Cape. After that I got a degree in IT from Walter Sisulu University,” said the 32-year-old Dunoon resident who is a programmer analyst at
Woolworths in Cape Town. The single mum wheels herself around to clean her two-bedroom house, cooks and bathes her child! She has taught herself how to do everything on her won—including driving! When she was looking for a driving school she struggled to find one and it prompted her to get an instructors drivers license. When she has time she teaches people with disabilities to drive, using her specially adapted car. “I want to teach people with disabilities to get from point A to B. In IT I do not make a difference in disabled people’s lives but I want to interact and help others,” she said. Her attacker was never caught and she said she does not harbour any anger towards him. “What keeps me going is that there a reason behind everything. I look at the positive side. Maybe If I wasn’t disabled, I wouldn’t have been as successful as I am now,” said Nomandla.
Nomandla Mqamelo enjoys the sun at Boluberg’s Big Bay beachfront.
Photo. Isolabantu news.