Ama Wheelies

The wheelchair farmers of Mpumalanga aka Ama Wheelies will on 14 May 2011 celebrate the official launch of the very first quadriplegic home & training centre of it’s kind in Mpumalanga, South Africa. To help cover the daily expenses and living costs at the home the guys will be hosting a charity golf day in Lydenburg. Over the last few weeks a few of you expressed interest in supporting our efforts but sadly many of you cannot personally attend the golf day in Lydenburg on 14 May 2011.

With this in mind we invite you to take part in a virtual round of golf with us on Twitter, facebook, via email and any other online way that works best for you. This way anyone can take part no matter where you live.

The Ama Wheelies Virtual Golf Weekend will work like this:

1. RSVP using this contact form before Thursday 28 April 2011- Send us your name, contact details and number of players.
2. Print the attached scorecard.
3. This is an 18 hole virtual golf coarse and your challenge is to sell your 18 holes.
4. To do this, approach your friends, family, co-workers. Educate them about life as a quadriplegics or refer them to our blog, Tell them about the virtual golf weekend & ask them to purchase a hole. Collect the donations & Document who buys each hole and the rand value donated per hole. The full list of donations and hole owners will be hosted on our blog once the golf day is finished.
5. Transfer the funds collected to our bank account using any of our official payment systems. Please use your name & surname as ref when making the payment.
6. Email a proof of payment and either fax or email a copy of your score card to stand in line to win big.

The player that raises the most money selling the virtual holes during the 18 hole virtual charity golf weekend will be crowned as champion and will win the grand prize. Wanna know what you are playing for? 10% of whatever is raised during the virtual charity golf weekend. (We hope to raise R25200.00)

We have a few other small and not so small mystery prizes up for grabs. So don’t delay, RSVP today.
Companies who want to enter teams are also more than welcome. We need at least 40 players to make this work, please show support. Any company who enters more than 10 players will receive special mention on our blog, twitter and facebook profiles and a special place in our hearts.

Come on, join us for a round of Virtual Golf and show support for the Quadriplegic friends of Mpumalanga.

Virtual Golf Weekend starts on Friday 29 April 2011 at 8am and ends Monday 2 May at 8am.

You must register to take part before THURSDAY 28 April 2011.
All donations and score card emails need to reach us by latest Tuesday 3 May 2011 to qualify.
Winners will be announced on 14 May 2011.

Tag your tweets with #AmaWheelies #VirtualGolf

Key:

• Par is the goal value per hole sold.
• Stroke is the value you got for the hole.
• Metres is the amount of friends you had to speek to before selling the individual hole. Lower results are best.
• Goal value or PAR per ScoreCard is R630.00
• Hole in one is any single hole purchase for R100.00 or more.

Living on a farm and in a tropical region, certainly has it’s advantages, things grow! We moved in the last days of November.  December was spent settling in and January we cleared our first beds and started planting vegetables.

No sooner did us plant vegetables or visitors started arriving and as beautiful as these may be they are unwelcome. First it was the geese; they ate all the cabbages and sweet potatoes. Next came the cows again eating the cabbages but also ate the tomatoes plants nibbling the entire plants. We erected fences and it was great fun teaching the boys how to pull wire! No you dirty minded creature we were erecting a fence and you pull the wire to get the fence up straight. At least the fence keeps the cows and geese at bay; however the monkeys soon discovered we grow baby marrows. Our marrows are sweet and taste better than a cucumber and delicious raw. Within 5 days the little marrows are the size of a butternut; but the monkeys do daily visits scaling the fence. The monkeys also love our gem-squash. We chase the monkeys off and resorted to picking the marrows on third day and then they are the size of an English cucumber and delicious.

As to ‘pulling wire’ modern ethnology helps; the old conventional wire puller was laborious, took time to fit and if you over-tightened the wire it snapped leaving you with the awkward job of trying to tie the wire that snapped and too short. Dean visited the local hardware and they certainly make ‘pulling wire’ simple! They sell gadgets, but this one you tie to the pole, thread the wire thru and a couple of turns with a size 10 spanner and the wire is pulled tight and your fence erected with ease. Moral of the story – come to the farm and we will teach you the pleasant way of pulling wire!

Our garden is still only to supply the kitchen but we are proud to say we grow beetroot, baby marrows, carrots, garlic, goose berries, herbs, lettuce, peas we just planted for winter, potatoes, rhubarb, spinach, spring onions, sweet potatoes and tomatoes. We do intend growing vegetables on a large scale however we must erect tunnels to protect veggies from monkeys. Tunnels are expensive to erect and we seek a sponsor!

The pictures below show some of our lekker goodies we produce

Sandile picking 3day old baby marrows, our carrots we planted 25th February and looking good and likewise the other vegetables

With the boys pulling wire and the vegetables growing we had time to focus on paperwork. Our lotto application we submitted however and very important our books had to be audited before we could submit our application and Lotto requirement is the auditors have to be registered. As a new home lacking money this was a huge problem and West Evans incorporated an auditing firm from Bedfordview came to our rescue doing the audit free of charge. They saved the day and did an excellent job and best they are quick and we proudly recommend them to anyone.

Our preparations for the golf day 14 May are also making good progress. It’s our fund raiser and we need more prizes, sponsorships and players! Outright donations also welcome.

We look forward to seeing all of you in Lydenburg on the 14th!

Last week we reported on the great news that Vodacom had selected our picture to be featured as their new facebook profile pic. Everyone here was so excited about the news.

Sadly Vodacom was forced to pull the image only hours after posting because some non disabled people mind you took offence to a small typo.

We are all imperfect and errors can enter at any time.  To show our continued support of the Red brand and to show we have no hard feelings on the error, we thought to inviting everyone concerned to discover new possibilities with red using our slightly tweaked image below.  As they say, a little red goes along way and we at Ama Wheelies are very happy to have benefited from a little Vodacom red love.  Thank you Vodacom, You guys ROCK!

What you guys think?  Is this better?

The Longtom Ultra & Half Marathon, one of South Africa’s most popular road races took place recently in Lydenburg. A few of the boys and girls from Ama Wheelies went along this year to show their support for this event.

Below is a report from Barry Botes the founder of Ama Wheelies who was on the scene:

“Runners running an ultra marathon know they won’t all win, some simply run for the achievement of completing what they start.  You may say I am not one to talk sitting in my wheelchair, but I wasn’t always in a wheelchair and ran a number of races before the tragic incident; however I can tell you no matter the preparation, a exhausting long race of 56km will be a impossibility for most runners to complete, unless good back-up is provided. Ama Wheelies proudly assisted the runners at water-point 10 during the the Longtom Ultra & Half Marathon on 26 March 2010 in Lydenburg. Working at the halfway point, handing out water coke and refreshments was a pleasure, encouraging the runners was good fun, although a tired person did not want to hear there is 27 more kilometres to run.

Ama Wheelies is involved in a similar race not to win but to help people that suffered spinal injury in accidents rehabilitating them back to live a meaningful life. It was invigorating seeing Sarah, Barry and David with different spinal injuries and levels of recovery supporting and assisting the runners.

The morning was misty and athletes jumped away in rain from Sabie at 6h00 and started arriving after seven with most past this water hole at 10h00.

Along with the Ama Wheelies team Lydenburg High Schools first team Rugby players all Ready and waiting for the runners to arrive. Lydenburg High School deserve commendation; it is rare to find 5 young men and rugby players at that, for rugby players are known to be the rebels and here contrary to the norm we found these well mannered men, eager to help and better they don’t drink or smoke. Young men you deserve mention and merit and you are excellent ambassadors for your school –well done!

High School Lydenburg you can be proud of these 5 young men!”

If like the guys from Ama Wheelies your heart moves you to help those running the race of life, please consider making a small or not so small donation to the Quadriplegics of Mpumalanga.

Ever cent helps and with your support we can keep running.

Ama Wheelies is happy to report that today 08/04/2011 we were featured on the Vodacom facebook page. This after Vodacom rebranded earlier this week to Red and invited people from around South Africa to submit pics of support.

On receiving the invitation to take part from our blogger, we quickly set about taking a few pics.  The timing of the call for pictures was not the most convenient and anyone who has ever stayed with us will tell you things take alot of time and need to be planned well in advance. Especially photo shoots, most of us are shy and not really liking the public attention. Being on a short deadline to get the picture in, Barry Botes the founder of Ama Wheelies and two of our non disabled helpers quickly jumped into action to make sure that AmaWheelies could benefit from the possible free publicity and help to create awareness for Quadriplegics throughout South Africa.  There were no guarantee’s that our photo would be used, but it was worth a shot.

Ama Wheelies has also benefited alot from the help & support of the friendly people at Vodacom over the last few months, who have made sure that we have the fastest possible internet connection available on the farm in Lydenburg.  Without this connection we would be cut off from the outside world and so we thought it best to give back alittle by showing support for the new colours of our favourite mobile provider. Yes Vodacom thats you!

Lancelot who has limited knowledge of camera equipment volunteered to snap the pics while Sandile a non disabled helper got Barry into shot and then quickly fetched one of the chairs not in use and jumped into shot (anything to get some attention).  A few good laughs were had by all and hopefully Sandile knows that we do not want new members.

We eagerly  submitted the pics, using that super fast 3G connection mentioned earlier and within no time our picture was online.  Even though the Vodacom Facebook group has over 40000 members, we are happy to say that our picture was featured.  Thank you Vodacom.

A little human error and a classic wording fail, took a picture that would probably not have received much attention and boosted it into the limelite. So far over 300 people and counting have seen the picture. We sure hope this goes viral.  Creating awareness for the Quads of Mpumalanga is a very challenging job, we are happy though that without even knowing it, Vodacom helped to not only create awareness but also helped to make us smile alittle. Yes being a quadriplegics is nothing to smile about, but sometimes its good to just sit back and have a good laugh. Earlier today our good friend @TracyTodd posted this on Twitter “Have a laugh, twice-daily, and you’ll look and feel 20 years younger in no time.” We cannot agree more and thank Vodacom for bringing a smile to our faces with this wording fail.  You guys made our day and possibly our weekend! Thank you!

Have a great weekend everyone!