By: Mpuru Tswaranani Green
Every year lives of approximately 1.3 million people lose their lives due to road accidents. Between 20 and 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability as a result of the injury.
People struggle a lot after sustaining injuries from car accidents as others tend to lose their jobs, due to many are of hard labour and require power. Of which a person with a broken arm cannot meet the requirements anymore and some jobs require mental health. One of the biggest injuries caused by an accident is head injury, where a person’s head gets damaged.
A student who studies at Vhembe TVET College who was involved in an accident that ended up causing damage to her head said that “ I tend to forget things easily many times as a student it is difficult to memories most of the things that I have studied and it makes my academics to drop, since I have been on an accident I struggle on my academics which frustrate me a lot to a point where I ended up having to attend therapy to get help so that I can be able to manage my anger.”
An educational phycologist also added that they assess people who are involved in accidents in order to see how the accident affected them and their minds and if they will be able to continue with their educational route or not. “ we have assessments time and again where we let students/learners write tests to see if they were not affected badly by the accident, we do that through giving them maths tests letting them draw a human when they are done, we let them interpret their drawing and most of the drawings are usually of an angry/ sad person. Some of them tend to draw human beings with other parts of their body missing like ears, legs, hand and etc which leads us to conclude that the learner/student state of mind is not right.”
People feel that it will be good for the government to give people who were involved in accidents and were affected very badly special attention not only Road Accident Fund (RAF) money but also needs to see if they can get a special school where they can continue with their studies and with people who ae in the same situation as theirs without having to pay for it or anything.
