We are part of a group of final-year Occupational Therapy students who were placed in Daspoort and surrounding areas for their community block. During our time in the community, we had to implement a community project. We identified Happy Sabby Day Care Centre as a site for our community project. Happy Sabby has 109 children and four teachers but they only have four classrooms among them. These classrooms are not spacious enough for the number of children that are in each classroom. We noticed that there was an extra classroom that was being used as a storeroom. For the project, we decided to clean out the storeroom and organise it so that it could be used as a classroom for the Grade Rs because it was bigger than the classroom that was currently used for the 38 Grade Rs.

We worked together with Thabo Skosane, the Grade R teacher, as well as Sabina Monyoko, the school principal, to clean the storeroom. We removed everything from the storeroom so that we could sort and organise it. Together with Thabo and Sabina, we had to decide what could still be used at the school, what could be donated to the community, and what had to be thrown away. Everything that could still be used at the school was cleaned of all the dust it had collected in the storeroom where the floor was still unfinished. Bags of cement were needed to complete the floor to convert the storeroom into a classroom. After cleaning, everything was distributed among the various classrooms, and some of the resources were packed and organised into shelves.

Before and after

While sorting the resources in the storeroom, we identified educational toys and activities. Based on this, we decided to compile an educational booklet that incorporated the toys and activities to guide the teachers with age-appropriate classroom activities. We compiled two educational booklets, one for three- to four-year-olds and another for five- to six-year-olds. Each teacher received a booklet according to the ages of the children in their classroom. In the final stages of the project, we distributed the relevant resources to the classrooms for the teachers to use. Among the things in the storeroom, we found a pile of blankets that the children could use during their nap time. The teachers volunteered to wash the blankets at home since they had limited time during school days to sort the storeroom with us.

Interdisciplinary collaboration
During our time in the community, we met two stakeholders from New Schools of Hope, a non-profit organisation (NPO), who are in the process of establishing schools in the area. We worked together with them to learn about the community of Melusi, the needs that they had identified there, and how we could make a difference as they had been involved in the community for a few years. They supported and guided us throughout the process. 

Furthermore, we met a group of five Architecture students from the University of Pretoria who are currently developing the Community Youth Centre in Melusi. We collaborated with the Architecture students to design shelves for the Happy Sabby storeroom. The students also donated leftover wood from their project for us to build the shelves. The shelves were then built by our group members and Thabo and are now used at Happy Sabby to keep their storeroom organised. While compiling the educational booklet we realised that there were resources that the school would benefit from. We then reached out to Trevor Strauss who does woodwork in our Occupational Therapy department. He helped us to design and build 11 clocks for the children to use to learn how to read analogue time, and 120 building blocks.

We are truly grateful for the support, donations, and other forms of interprofessional collaboration that we had from the community and other stakeholders. We enjoyed the experience and learned so much from everyone who collaborated with us. We hope to foster these relationships and that there can be future collaborations