I haven’t yet written about that
activist project I am working on and so I’d like to talk about that; Meg, Eric,
Drew and I were SO thankful for all the support that we received in our
fundraising. We were able to raise over $1,200 to revitalize the physiotherapy
garden at Maitland Cottage Hospital and do activities with the children who are
hospitalized there. It is so much more than I expected and it is great to see
that our family and friends can see the positive effect that this project can
have on the children who are staying at MCH.
For Easter weekend, we decided we
would bring some festive fun to the wards. We wanted to do an Easter egg hunt,
but seeing as most of the children have plaster casts, we decided against that
idea… We went out and bought all different types of candy, as well as bags and
ribbon. We put together little Easter bags for each of the children at Maitland
and made Easter egg cards to put inside. We then brought them into the hospital
and handed them out to each patient. They had just woken up from their nap but
they seemed really excited to get their bags of candy!
Between internships, classes, being split up on the homestay weekends and our excursion to Johannesburg, it’s been difficult to organize and work on the project, but we have already gotten a lot accomplished. We have weeded a large section of the garden, which doesn’t sound like hard work, but there were more weeds than I thought possible. We filled more than 10 trash bags totally full of weeds, and our backs were definitely sore! Not to mention the abnormally large spiders and other odd insects we came across.
The garden will mostly be succulents
because of the water shortage in Cape Town and the fact that the staff doesn’t
have a lot of free time to maintain the garden. We thought it’d be easiest to
have low-maintenance plants (and the director said the children like to squeeze
the squishy aloe plants). There are a few tomato plants already growing that
just need to be staked, as they’re taking over the walkway. This gave us the
idea to have a couple more vegetables mixed in with the succulents. We have
already gotten seeds for some small vegetable plants, since it’ll be fun for
the kids to stop and pick a green bean or tomato or something while working on
their physical therapy. We have plans to meet with the Kirstenbosch garden
center this week to determine exactly which plants we want and how many of
each. We’ll hopefully begin the planting process on Friday! It’s definitely
a lot more work than we thought because the walkways need new gravel and all of
the soil is dry so we need to bring in fertilizer, but it’ll look lovely by the
end!
After the planting, we’ll be
spending a lot of time doing activities with the children so that they can feel
like they are a part of the new garden. We have the supplies to make wind chimes
with them to hang up outside, since theres a structure with wooden beams that
they already have one wind chime on. This is a nice activity for the children
who are on strict bedrest and won’t be able to leave the ward to paint in the
art room. We also have wooden butterflies and paint that the other children can
work on that we can hang from trees to add color to the garden! With the paint
we are also painting two wooden benches and having each child put their hand
print on one of them. Because we were able to raise so much money, we are
hoping that after purchasing the plants, there will be extra funds to do some
more activities with the kids!
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