WILLING AND ABLE

SHE was just 11 months old when doctors gave her parents the news: Russell and Zelda Mycroft were told their youngest daughter, Chaeli, had cerebral palsy. This meant that for her entire life she would struggle to move and would have to use a wheelchair and be reliant on others to help her do simple things such as brush her teeth.

Many would have grown up seeing all of this as a burden, yet from a young age Chaeli was taught to embrace her disability as a unique opportunity to do things differently. And something the 27-year-old from Cape Town definitely hasn’t allowed it to do is to stop her from following her dreams.

In 2015 she became the first female quadriplegic to summit Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. A year later she became the first wheelchair athlete to complete the Comrades Marathon.

She’s also competed in the Cape Town Cycle Tour and been crowned the 2015 Ballroom and Latin American Wheelchair Dancing double world champion.

‘DISABILITY CAN BE HARD TO UNDERSTAND. IT’S OKAY IF YOU’RE CONFUSED. I’M CONFUSED A LOT OF THE TIME TOO’

But it’s her advocacy work of which she’s most proud. At age nine she launched the Chaeli Campaign to raise money for her first motorised wheelchair – and money came in so thick and fast that she decided to use it to help other disabled people.

The Chaeli Campaign