Paralysed man left at festival
2005-08-08 10:29
Pretoria - "They forgot him, and now they're missing," said an assistant at the Oppikoppi music festival medical tent after a man in a wheelchair had to overnight there because his friends had apparently forgotten him in the beer tent.
Zach Joubert, 35, from Pretoria, is paralysed and suffers from a disease that destroys the nervous system and affects speech.
The only information the medics could gleam from him when they asked him where he was from was the letters P-T-A, which he indicated on an alphabet chart around his neck.
Oppikoppi security guards found Joubert lost among strangers in the beer tent where the rugby match between South Africa and New Zealand was broadcast on Saturday.
Joubert's own tent was still unpitched and lying somewhere in the dirt road in front of the beer tent.
Freak out
"Don't tell anybody, because my mother will freak out," he typed on his cellphone's SMS function.
Natasja Mauders, one of the ambulance assistants, said: "I can't believe somebody can just leave a person like this on his own. It's not fair towards him."
Mauders said Joubert's cellphone had no signal, and when they did manage to phone some of the stored numbers, nobody answered. She said somebody from Pretoria called on Sunday to say they would come and fetch him.
"We went in search of his friends at the place he had indicated, but their tents were gone. They seemed to have moved," she said.
Misha Loots, one of the organisers, said it was announced from all four stages at Oppikoppi that anybody who knew Joubert must collect him from the medical tent, but without any success.
By Sunday afternoon, Joubert was still at the medical tent.