Pretoria - DISABLED people were more than capable of taking care of themselves during times of Covid-19, Deputy Minister of Social Development Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu said.
She was speaking during a compliance assessment visit to the Dreamhouse Workshop for the Blind in Silverton, where she demonstrated to the workers how to sanitise their chairs.
She said these were the kind of small things she advocated, because it was wrong to believe that disabled people needed everything to be done for them.
She urged society not to make workers into charity cases because this discrimination was exactly what disabled people were fighting against.
“They must clean their chairs because they clean their houses. Let us show you what we can do, don’t over think on our behalf and don’t take too much responsibility away from us because it is these things that make us struggle to get jobs,” she said.
DreamHouse is a Pretoria based organisation that employs and empowers people with disabilities as well as disadvantaged members of the community.
Chief executive of the facility, Emmie Boshoff, welcomed the minister’s visit and said they did what they could in terms of health protocols because they wanted to ensure that they were not putting anyone at risk of Covid-19 infection.
She said the disabled group had resumed work in June, and operations at the site were running smoothly.
Their main contract was to manufacture and package fertiliser sticks; however, while some of their members were also working in packaging at L’Oréal in Midrand.
“To us that was a breakthrough for disabled people to work there (at L’L’Oréal) said their manager Willie Boshoff. ”We started off in this building. We trained them on packaging here and eventually moved them. L’Oréal has told us that they have been working well despite the challenges with their disabilities and we are proud of that,” he said.
The department distributed sanitisers and hand soap for the facility, as well as tea. The minister urged the workshop to keep up its good work of employing disabled people so that they could be productive members of society and care for themselves.