Letter from Razia, Ayub and Nura

Salaam Turgay

How are you? Well I hope after a busy summer – you are coming to the end of the season aren’t you?

Hello everyone – Barbara, Alejandra, Ramona, Irena, Rick, Ventura, Axel and everyone who remembers us.

Firstly I have to apologise for only writing now. I have been adjusting to being a stay-at-home-work-from-home mom. The time has just flown by and suddenly its been almost 5 moths since we were in Antalya. For us it feels like it was a life time ago but also like it was yesterday – we are very nostalgic and look at our pictures and talk about our time there all the time. We would love to come back again so we have to work on that plan. We hope you are all well and had a great summer. We heard about the floods in turkey and hope you are all ok. We are well, we had a very cold and wet winter which is not completely over yet. We are supposed to be in Spring but the nights are still very cold and there are still a few weak cold fronts passing over Cape Town which brings the day time temperature down – although we are all excited because tomorrow the temperature is supposed to be 25 degrees celsius! Yeah!

Anyway about Nura – she is doing really well. We are still watching the videos we took of our time with Daisy and Nanu. Nura continues to swim once a week with a hydrotherapist. Our indoor pool is complete but we have not sorted the

heating yet, but as soon as we do that we’ll be able to swim more often. Although she is used to cold water after the Mediteranean Sea! On our return home everyone commented that Nura seemed so mature – not so babyish. Nura is still demanding but as pleasant and full of smiles as ever. We have advertised the dolphin therapy programme and Antalya to anyone who will listen and hopefully you will meet a few more people from SA. We also attended a talk on animal therapy research and more specifically about the therapeutic value of swimming with dolphins. The specific programme is run in Mozambique but they swim with wild dolphins – so this would not work for Nura. She is eating well and growing taller and taller – and of course heavier. We have seen no marked difference in her behaviour or manner but she does seem more focused and seems to pay attention to you for longer periods when you speak to her. She is also very chatty and makes a lot of noise.

When we returned we visited a hippo therapy centre and wanted to start riding but then the weather changed and just got so wet and cold that we decided to wait till the weather improved, so soon we will start doing  Hippo Therapy – we’ll let you know how it goes.

Thats about it from us. Please pass this to everyone and also Felis and Salih. I owe them an email too and will get to it soon. Please keep in touch – we would love to hear of everyones experiences this past summer and what has been happening with everyone.

All the best

Razia, Ayub and Nura

For dolphin therapy related questions you can contact this family via email: