The heat of the day had just started to build when a multidisciplinary team of 50 medical volunteers — including general practitioners, gynaecologists, dentists and dieticians — arrived in the town of Touws River (Touwsrivier) on Saturday. 

Hundreds of townspeople had gathered around Touws River Primary School, where the Gift of the Givers team was set up to provide the largest medical intervention in the history of the town. As the volunteers entered the school hall to prepare their stations, applause broke out among the waiting crowd.

Elderly residents wait outside Touws River primary school hall to be seen by medical doctors (Photo: Brenton Geach)

“We’re glad that they’re here to come and help us today; we looked forward to today,” said Helen Gehbauer, a resident of Touwsrivier who brought her 11-year-old son to see a dentist. “I think it actually helps the community because they don’t have to go and sit at the clinic for hours.”

Touws River, an old railway town along the N1 about 180km from Cape Town, is in need of medical intervention daily, according to Rashaad Baker, co-founder and chairperson of the Compassionate Hearts soup kitchen in the town. The population of almost 10,000 people has access to only one clinic, staffed by two doctors who come once a week.

The Gift of the Givers medical team members attend to residents needing medical attention at Touws River primary school. (Photo: Brenton Geach )

“So, we have a doctor on a Tuesday and a doctor on a Thursday. Each one comes here once a week, which forces them to prioritise who they’re going to see, who they’re not going to see, and it’s unfair for the rest of the community,” said Baker.

Dentists, meanwhile, visit the town only once a month. Some months, they do not come at all. 

Dr Abdurahman Daniels injects Klara Blou (66) with a painkiller before extracting a tooth at Touws River primary school. (Photo: Brenton Geach)

“The problem is that a child sits with a toothache. He can’t wait two months to have the tooth extracted,” said Baker. “Our old people, our disabled people, it’s not good for them. Because besides having a toothache, they have added and underlying illnesses, like diabetes, high blood pressure, and these things just […] add to their problem.”

The closest hospital and ambulances are in Worcester, about an hour away, according to Dalene van der Merwe, the other founder of the Compassionate Hearts soup kitchen. For many, it is a struggle to access these hospital facilities due to a lack of transport and funds.

Dr Raeesa Parker attends to a young girl who is about to have a tooth extracted. Photo: Brenton Geach)

Gift of the Givers’ intervention

Saturday’s medical intervention was the single biggest medical intervention by Gift of the Givers for a selected community in South Africa, in terms of the composition and size of the medical team, according to the NGO.

The team operated with great efficiency, triaging and assisting hundreds of waiting patients. Many local people waited patiently for hours in pockets of shade outside the school, allowing children and the elderly to be seen first. Some community members who assisted with running the intervention waited until the end of the day to receive attention for their ailments.

Groups from De Doorns, Laingsburg and surrounding farms travelled to Touws River to take advantage of the opportunity to seek medical care.

Residents seeking medical attention line up outside Touws River primary school where Gift of the Givers set up their medical camp. (Photo: Brenton Geach)

“This is good, because the problem is not just unique to Touws River. It’s the surrounding areas, also, the surrounding towns. All of these are farming communities, and they suffer,” said Baker.

Patients were referred between different medical units during the course of the day. However, initial triaging shows that 130 patients went to general practitioners and 58 to the orthopaedic surgical team, according to Dr Lynne Hoole, who does remote and austere critical care. A further 24 patients went to obstetrics and gynaecology, while 40 saw the physiotherapist.

While only 27 patients went to paediatrics from triage, many of the dentistry patients were referred to that unit. By the end of the day, the 12-person dental team had seen close to 900 patients, according to Dr Naeem Kathrada, the head medical coordinator for Gift of the Givers in the Western Cape.

The Touws River railway station was once a thriving junction and the economic centre of the town. (Photo: Brenton Geach)

“I think 50 to 60% of the patients that are here today are for dental,” Kathrada told Daily Maverick. A large number of these were children.

In the communities Gift of the Givers visits, toothache often takes a back seat to more serious medical conditions, such as asthma, said Kathrada.

“We can see dental and optometry are the big things that are definitely going to need an upping of services in this particular town,” he said.

The Gift of the Givers medical team came in to provide direct, fast intervention to improve the quality of life of townspeople, according to Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, CEO of the NGO. 

“Apply the situation [to] yourself. If your child is sick, you can’t see properly, your tooth is sore — you don’t wait six months to get it sorted out,” he said.

The “medical camp” also served as an opportunity to assess the health status of the community, said Sooliman. He explained: “[That’s] why you’ve got a team like what we’ve brought, because they’ll be able to pick up the type of conditions prevailing. And then we could take that to the Western Cape Health [Department] and say, ‘Look, maybe you need to increase your clinic twice a week, or maybe once a week bring eye people, once a week bring dental people, once a week bring something else.’ So, you have a general idea of what the major need in the area is.”

The road to Touws River

Gift of the Givers has provided support for the town of Touws River over the past two years, predominantly in the form of food for the soup kitchen. Community activists began reaching out to the NGO in April 2020, after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic drove the town to the verge of collapse, according to Ali Sablay, project manager for Gift of the Givers.

“They started calling us early morning, late evening. Community activists worried about the elderly people. This town is dependent on tourism. The tourism industry shut down. Aquila Game Reserve, which employs most of this town’s [people], they had to put off workers. [W]hen the breadwinners lost their jobs, bread was taken away from the children,” said Sablay. 

Unemployment in the area is now above 90%. Gift of the Givers assisted through feeding schemes and the delivery of food parcels to the elderly.

In the week before the medical intervention took place, the NGO visited the Touws River Primary School to provide stationery and books to the pupils. It was during this visit, said Sablay, that they observed a small child crying to her mother due to a toothache. When Sablay asked the principal about whether there was a dentist in town, he was told about the lack of facilities.

“I said, ‘What if a child has toothache?’” said Sablay. “He said the parents have to look after the child. That’s when I informed Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of the current situation, what’s happening here. He then said, ‘No, we definitely have to help.’”

Sooliman views the resulting medical intervention, with its many volunteers, as an example of “active citizenry” — something he would like to see more of in the country.

“I need the citizens of this country to realise that this country is ours. It doesn’t belong to the government,” said Sooliman. “The government is only a custodian of the country, but it belongs to all 60 million of us. And what is not being done, we shouldn’t sit back and say, ‘Okay, it’s not being done’, because the more you allow it to deteriorate, the more you and your community suffer.” DM