Ama Wheelies

Ama Wheelies blogger and friend Simon Botes was  recently named as one of the Top 200 Young People in South Africa by Mail & Guardian. This is a great achievement for Simon and we are excited and happy to have one of the Top 200 youngsters in South Africa helping out here at Ama Wheelies. Congrats Simon!

Credit: Nokia.com

Good morning everyone.  This post comes live from the Ama Wheelies golf day in Lydenburg, South Africa. The event is proudly hosted by our new friends of  the Lydenburg Golf Club. Thanx guys

The morning started bright and early after a late night of planning, blogging, visiting and just having a good time with the Quadriplegic members of AmaWhelies who had made the epic trip to Lydenburg for the event.

We will be live blogging and tweeting via @SimonBotes & @AmaWheelies from the event today. The official Hashtag for today is #AmaWheelies and you can follow live pics here.

You are more than welcome to follow us and help to get us trending on Twitter.

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!

We are happy to announce that our blogger, “Simon Botes has been named a member of Forum Nokia Champion, a recognition and reward program for top mobile developers worldwide.

Every six months, Forum Nokia, world’s largest dedicated mobile application developer community, invites outstanding members of the forum.nokia.com community to accept a one-year membership in this reward program.

Forum Nokia Champions are a select group of outstanding individuals, honored because of their skills and devotion to the Forum Nokia community. Selection is made on the basis of each nominee’s knowledge as it is displayed through contributions to forum.nokia.com, as well as proven expertise within the mobile developer community.

Forum Nokia is pleased to recognize Simon Botes for his spirit of community in sharing his knowledge with fellow mobile developers.” Ama Wheelies also recognizes these qualities and thanks Simon for his dedication to our cause, his hard work keeping our blog upto date and his constant help in our outreach programs.

We wish Simon all the best for 2011 and beyond.

Breaking news:

Ama Wheelies last night 7 February 2010 at 12:35am got some great coverage on 702 Talk radio and 567 Cape Talk. The  overnight show hosted by David Donde introduced  Simon Botes the Ama Wheelies social media guy and Barry Botes the founding member and project leader of Ama Wheelies. Audio clip coming soon..

Update: 702 and 567 Cape Talk don’t have a recording available.  Oops maybe next time..

We chatted about our exciting project and pushed to create awarness for Quadriplegics living not only in Mpumalanga but also throughout South Africa.

Even though this was a late night, early morning show I am happy to report that within a few minutes from the show going live we had received an email from a community member trying to find suitable accommodation for a paraplegic living in the Eastern Cape.  This shows just how huge the need is for such accommodation  not only in Mpumalanga but also in all the other provinces. We will be sure to point our Eastern Cape friend in the right direction so he can also be empowered to live a ‘normal’ life.

Below is an extract from the 702 Talk radio and 567 Cape Talk websites.

“For those who may have missed the news, Ama Wheelies is a very exciting project. The self help centre for Quadriplegics in Thaba Chweu (Lydenberg) will cater for all the diverse national groups found in South Africa and will not only be a home for the disabled and wheelchair bound quadriplegics, it will also offer them the chance to once again be self sustaining. There is still space to accommodate more people. Barry and Simon Botes spoke to David about the project and encouraged people to support their Golf Day fund-raiser at Glen Vista Golf Club on 9 March. More information and contact details can be found on the website.”

A huge shoutout goes to David Donde, 702 Talk radio and 567 Cape Talk for creating awareness for plegics in South Africa.  Lets do it again sometime and maybe also during one of the earlier shows