A 47 year Maria Maduze is a Social Work Supervisor at Sedibeng Region and she is currently working in the Probation Unit under Program 4.4 Substance Abuse.
According to Maduze the year 2020 has been the most significant and perhaps most traumatic experience of her life. When lockdown started last year in March 2020 she and her colleagues were expected to work remotely and to be on call.
"One of the priorities of the Government was to introduce temporary shelters to assist with homeless people and substance abuse became a huge problem as most of the people who were removed from streets and placed in the shelters were users", says Maduze.
"We were expected to monitor and refer those who needed rehabilitation at that time. The screening and assessing became a challenge and our manager had to request Social workers who were on lockdown to come back and assist."
Maduze recalls that 2020 was the first time she felt vulnerable and exposed to the virus. She however gained strength and continued working even though the working environment had changed completely as staff we were now on rotation.
"Teamwork became very important especially with limited resources and methods of communication changed as meetings had to be on Microsoft Teams.
The biggest challenge was monitoring official when they are working remotely as we were expected to make sure that service delivery continues in these hard times."
"My gratitude goes to our department for making sure that the resources available for efficient service delivery. The support we got from our management and Social Workers who volunteered their time in the hard times is appreciated." she concludes.