Cape Town – From tending goals on a soccer pitch to being laid low by a brain tumour, one Parkwood woman was not about to allow life to stop her from completing her matric at her mainstream high school.
As a normal 16-year-old in Grade 10 at Fairmount High in 2013, Jody Oliver had dreams of becoming a teacher and had no idea there was a tumour growing in her brain.
“I was standing at the goalpost, but could not see the ball. I told the teacher and I was taken home. The next day I woke up very sick and was taken to hospital."
After the tumour was removed she was left blind, and wondered what she would do with the rest of her life.
“It felt like the end,” she said.
After spending a month at home, Oliver found herself at the League of Friends of the Blind for independence training, where Armand Bam, the organisation’s executive director, asked her: “What do you want to do with your life?”
“I said I wanted to go back to school to fulfil my dreams of becoming a teacher.”
She now works at the league, and will spend the rest of the year deciding on her future and where she wants to study.
Oliver passed Grade 10, but half way through Grade 11, in 2015, her cancer resurfaced. Six weeks after a second operation, she was back at school. But in Grade 12 her life nearly caved in again when her mother died.
Nevetheless, she persevered and matriculated with the Class of 2016.
“I opened doors for other children to also go mainstream schools. I feel very good about that,” she said.