Livhuwani Mutsharini insisted on being allowed to go to school, despite its being in deep rural Venda, Limpopo, with no facilities for disabled children.
‘We just have to live with the situation. It’s almost impossible to change,” says Edith Mikosi, principal of Mikosi Primary School in Gondeni village near Thohoyandou.
The children use pit toilets, which can’t accommodate wheelchairs. When Livhuwani needs the toilet, his teacher has to carry him there and help him.
But Mikosi has done her best with a limited budget and built a cement ramp so Livhuwani and another child, who is also wheelchair-bound, can get into the classrooms.
This is a school without electricity, so there was no way it could afford to hire someone to build the ramp.
Instead, Mikosi bought cement for R100 and teachers collected sand from the area and built the ramp themselves.
Mikosi marvels at Livhuwani’s abilities and says he’s the most rilliant child she’s ever admitted to the school.
His Grade R class teacher, Florence Marubini, barely disguises the fact hat of the 60 children in her class, Livhuwani is one of her favourites.
‘Look here at his numeracy book. He’s the only one who got 100%,” she says, proudly pointing at one of his tasks.
When Livhuwani’s mother, Thifhelimbilu Mutsharini, went to register him at the school at the start of the year, Mikosi didn’t consider turning him away.
‘We are compelled to cope because these parents can’t afford to send their children to schools with proper facilities for the disabled,” she explains.
Livhuwani says he doesn’t consider himself disabled.
‘I’m just like them,” he says, pointing his stump at his classmates working at their desks.
He also shows off his counting skills. He doesn’t have fingers, but flaps five times on one little arm and then five times on the other to count to 10, before switching arms to finish at 12.
Those little stumps can easily hold a pencil and his handwriting is painfully neat.
He’s worked his way into the hearts of his schoolmates and teachers.
‘I hate to consider him a disabled child because there are things he does that normal children can’t do,” says Marubini, again stressing his higher-than-average academic ability.
Livhuwani has a wheelchair, which his mother got from Tshilidzini hospital, but quite happily moves around on his stumps, especially when at play and skateboarding.
Technikon Pretoria has heard of Livhuwani’s plight and earlier this month undertook to give him artificial limbs.
Lucky Nchabeleng, representative for the MEC in the Premier’s Office Catherine Mabuza, says a joint Technikon and provincial government team would visit Livhuwani to determine his exact needs in the first week of July.
Mikosi Primary is a step ahead of the national Department of ducation’s plan to integrate physically disabled children into mainstream schools over the next three years.
National director for inclusive education Sigamoney Naicker says 30 primary schools nationwide would be made more user-friendly for disabled children by providing facilities such as ramps for wheelchairs and building specially adapted toilets.
Thirty existing special schools will also be upgraded into resource centres for the disabled.
Support teams will also be allocated to 30 education districts nationwide to give advice to schools that cater for disabled children, says Naicker.
An outreach programme will target disabled youth who are not at school, starting at government’s development nodes.
School management, governing bodies and professional staff will be prepared for the integration, while primary schools will be prepared to identify and address any barriers to learning from Grades R to 3.