stick and stone

A couple of Mondays ago, a primary student broke her wrist while doing a high jump. Though I arrived to the school just as this happened, there was no sense of urgency among the teachers who were around, so after they filled me in, I didn’t push on the subject, assuming that it has been taken care of properly. Then after about 20 mins of us sitting around our usual ‘faculty spot’ (under the mango tree), they started to have a serious discussion, and formally asked me to join. I had no idea what they were talking about, but as some started to switch to English during the discussion, it dawned on me that they were talking about the injured student.

It turned out, that the problem at hand hadn’t been taken care of at all. I found out that they simply just took the girl back to her parents’ house, and were now discussing the next step. I asked whether or not she received any medical treatment at all during this time, and the answer was, they took her to a local healer, and there was nothing he could do, which was why they took her to her parents. By this time, it would have been close to an hour since the girl injured herself—and had yet to received any proper care. Freaked out, I brought out my loud and rude self and urged that they should at least take her to the clinic, which is across the road from the school, a mere 30 feet away. Pretty sure I said something along the line of, “You are all teachers, not medical professionals, take her to the clinic! There is a nurse there!”

After another 5 mins of pondering, the group dispersed, and I am told that they would take her to the clinic. While they went to get her, I walked over the clinic since at this point, sitting idly under the mango tree lost its appeal. The teachers and the girl arrived shortly afterward, and she is about 12 years old. Her wrist was wrapped in an old t-shirt, and though she didn’t show it on her face, it was very obvious that the past hour has not been pleasant for her.

To my disappointment, the nurse didn’t look at her injury at all, rather, she gave her some medicine, and 2 shots, which I later found were pain killer. My irritation didn’t subside, so I urged them to take her to the hospital. Some more discussion in the local language went on, and the girl is picked back up on to the moto to leave the clinic. Since I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, the sight of them leaving gave hope that they were taking her to the hospital. However, I soon learned that it wasn’t true once the moto turned to go to the opposite direction.

Loud and rude again, I asked my Counter Part (CP) about what was going on. He told me that instead of the hospital, they were taking her to a bone setter in the next village. Another teacher, J, saw my disbelief, and reminded me that here in the village, not everyone has insurance or money to go to the hospital, so they go to local healers. I have never felt more useless in Ghana.

I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the mango tree, but I also didn’t know what else to do, so I just sat outside the clinic for a while. My CP left, but then came back and told me that J would take me to the bone setter. He wanted me to see what were going to happen.

So about 15-20 mins after the sport master and the girl left, J and I were on their trail to the next village. It took us about an hour roaming and asking around to finally found the bone setter’s house, remotely set on the outskirt of the village (I think because by this point, I had no idea where I was). When I got there, the girl’s parents were there, and she was lying down on a mat on the ground. Her eyes were closed but she wasn’t sleeping, so I guessed that the pain killer must have kicked in. Nothing was happening however, and I learned that they were waiting for someone to go and fetch the bone setter, because he was still at the farm.

So we sat and wait. People were just as jolly as ever, including the parents. Conversation flew between the 5 or 6 people who were there, and no one showed the least amount of morbid toward the situation, except for me, probably.

After another 5 or 10 mins, the bone setter finally arrived. He took a quick look at his patience, then went out to the back of his house. Then he came back with two rounds piece of woods that looked freshly chopped. The man trimmed the woods and slowly beat on them to remove the first layers of bark around it. “He is making the bandages”, I was told.

After the ‘bandages’ were finished, he took out a clump of something, I didn’t know what it was, but it sure looked like white clay, or a ball of shea butter. He put the thing inside a hollowed horn looking thing, and mashed it. After a while, a black soft clay like substance appeared, and he began to work on his patience.

When the bone setter unwrapped the shirt that was cover the broken wrist, I was definitely terrified. The wrist was not only definitely broke, but the bone pierced and was showing through the skin. It was a compound fracture, and it was finally going to be tended more than 2 hours later.

When I was 10, I broke my arm, both bones were fractures but they were both still inside my body, and it still sucked. I could only imagine how much pain the girl must have endured before the pain killer kicked in. Yet, somehow, I felt like I was the only person who was shocked by seeing all of this. The men started to move around the girl, holding on to her, as the bone setter slowly spread the clay over wound. Once the black substance covered arm evenly, he began to tug and pull on the arm to straighten it out. He did it slowly but forcefully, and at the same time, pushed the protruding piece of bone back into the skin.

Once again, I can only imagine how painful this process was, because even though she (probably )was high on pain killer, the girl still cried out, and the men had to hold her back. But the bone setter calmly carried on. What even more amazing was that though her face showed pain the entire time, she only cried out once.

After about a minute or two of shaping her wrist together, he bone setter wrapped it in one of the bandages that he made earlier, and used wove a thin rope around the entire thing to keep it secure. And that was it. All of this took about 5 mins and probably no more than 10? I recorded the first 4 and a half mins of it is on my camera. Maybe I'll post that some other time. So that was it, after more than 2 hours of waiting, her wrist was fixed in about 10 mins.

Once he was done, he took a drink of water (or maybe alcohol) and spat/sprayed over the entire newly made cast. Very sanitary. The parents gave him 6 Ghana Cedis, which is you want to Google the amount in dollars, would probably come up to be less than 5 US Dollars.

I visited the girl the next 2 days, fearing that I would walk into her house and see her arm horribly infected, but beside it being swollen, an initial effect which would go away soon enough, it seemed to be doing fine. By the week after, she was already out and about shucking ground nuts. No exaggeration. 

Witnessing this, by far, has been the most surreal thing in Ghana. I have been around traditional medicine and experience local cures for sickness when I was young, and often in the form of Eastern Medicines that you could find in Chinatown. This experience, however, was on a much different level, as for it to be taking place in this time period, when modern medicine has never been better, just seems so ludicrous, but here it is, and people do it anyway. I’m amazed, shocked and in awe at the same time. 

And don’t even let me start on how they weren’t able to afford the hospital in the first place.