Meet the West Rand’s toughest paramedic

Growing up, the 29-year-old Shricious Kubaye’s dreamt of helping people.

This passion combined with her love for fitness is what helped her to dethrone the current women’s champion at the recent Dräger SA Fire Combat and Rescue Challenge in Sandton.

After Kubaye and her team finished second in the female team category at the Midvaal Fight to Fire competition, and first in the mixed teams category on May 27, they qualified to go to the Dräger challenge. There she won the individual roping and tower challenge, the open H women’s overall division, and their team placed second among the mixed teams. The big win of the day was, however, when Kubaye knocked out the reigning champ to become the overall women’s winner in July.

As a little girl, she enjoyed the thrill of speed and had a passion for helping people and one way to combine the two was by becoming a paramedic. She then joined the industry in 2012 as a Basic Life Saving paramedic and worked for the private sector before furthering her studies and becoming part of the Gauteng Emergency Management Services (EMS) team as an Intermediate Life Support paramedic in 2018.

Another one of Kubaye’s passions has always been exercising and after joining the Gauteng EMS, she completed a rescue course in 2020 where her lecturer identified her as someone who could help assist the recruits with fitness. In April the team was told about the combat firefighter challenge and Jurgens Bence, her district manager, recommended that she enter.

Kubaye said the training was intense and it is all about endurance as well as being physically strong and fit.

“You do a lot of lifting, running, and carrying heavy weights. We had to exercise in heavy firefighter boots and full gear.”

During the Dräger challenge, where more than 500 people competed, they had different stages. There was a tower challenge where contestants had to grab a fire hose pack and run up three flights of stairs dressed in full personal protective equipment. Once at the top, they had to hoist another hose. While this looks like a firefighter challenge, Kubaye said for them as paramedics this would represent running upstairs with a jump bag.

Next, she had to hit the Keiser machine, a multi-functional strength training machine, to a certain point. This represented a forceful entry. She then had to run to a fully charged hose, aim it at a target, open it, and hit the target.

Lastly, Kubaye had to carry an 80kg doll for 60m, expressing how exhausted this makes a person.

Mamsie Maduna, one of her teammates, explained that the team challenge was a search and rescue mission. You had to save a patient from a dark, confined space. While two of the team members had to go into the space and search for the patient, others waited (above them) to help them hoist the ‘injured patient’ out of the confined space.

“It is so dark that you cannot see anything. You even have to move around on your knees and this is where communication with your team is key,” Maduna explained.

Kubaye added that she never expected to get this far, or even win for that matter.

“We were doing this for fun but now we ended up being committed, enjoying every moment and taking it seriously.”

Next, they will compete in Mosselbaai from October 5 to 7 where they will enter as teams and individuals. They will be competing with the Krugersdorp fire team and Kubaye said she wants the podium to be filled with West Rand competitors. She also, once again, has her sights set on a champion win and said, ‘I am going to take the championship from the lady there’.

But even with all this excitement, for Kubaye it still is about saving lives. She explained the best feeling is when someone calls an ambulance and they get there in the blink of an eye to help.

She would like to thank Manie Gouws their trainer and Malome Ngwato their coach for helping them on their fitness journey and getting to where they are now.