Teresa
Wottalogg Out of Africa
WHEN HEALERS MEET DEALERS
I’ve wanted to acquire some rudimentary First Aid skills for
years. Many of us living with HIV work with vulnerable clients and
it would be nice to know what to do in an emergency, or how to calm a person
down instead of panicking.
Last year, my sister and I were involved in a minor accident when an elderly
man riding a bicycle collided with the back of our car. He was bruised and
bleeding and had a slight nosebleed. All we could do was help untangle him
from his bent bicycle, sit him on the kerb and call an ambulance. So, I was
impressed when a young girl approached us, raised and pressed a vein on the
inside of the upper arm as well as tilting his head back slightly. The bleeding
soon subsided and the ambulance arrived. If the accident had been more serious
and in a remote area, we would have stood perplexed, stupefied, wringing our
hands and watching helplessly.
Growing up in Africa we came across many minor and not so minor accidents.
Because we did not wear shoes until we were about ten, many of us today have
a second, third or even fourth generation of toenails, casualties of hitting
feet against stones or protruding roots. Many children had a poorly developed
part of the brain that controls balance (medulla oblongata for all you would-be
doctors out there) and bruised themselves, falling over all the time. With
few toys, children improvised with old cloth, paper and plastic. Boys sometimes
manufactured their own ‘cars’ by mounting short wood planks on
discarded ball bearings and used these to cruise down steep hills at high
speed on new roads, steep enough to propel the carts even after it had reached
the bottom of the hill. Fingers, feet or whole arms got badly injured this
way. Wounds would be washed with a highly concentrated salt solution (or a
potassium iodide solution we used to call ‘gentian violet’) and
a clean cloth would be tied on. Most would heal quickly but a few would be
taken to hospital when they became septic.
We used traditional herbs to stop the bleeding and would get the injured person
to lie down and lift the injured arm. We all knew which herbs to use. For
small cuts, we would chew a certain herb and place the pulp on the cut. The
wound would close immediately; stopping the bleeding and leaving it looking
like a skilled surgeon had stitched it together with a very fine thread and
needle. At home, we boiled and cooled this herb to use as an antiseptic. At
Christmas, we picked herbs to chew to settle our stomachs after eating all
those
festive goodies. I knew which roots to boil for my stomach and to sooth my
eczema when it was very itchy.
As a child, I fell through the branches of a huge felled tree and fainted
from the sight of blood gushing from an artery inside
my
thigh. I awoke in hospital being given blood. Somehow my mother and grandmother
knew how to stem the flow. I still bear a large scar today.
With my father in detention, my mother was always too busy on the farm growing
enough to feed her five children to tend to us all individually. Fleas would
often invade our tender toes and get under the skin. She would use a small
razor to make tiny cuts in the toes and squeeze the juice of a wild fruit
into the cuts. The burning pain was so excruciating we would scream ourselves
to sleep. This offered temporary immunity from the fleas. I considered my
mother to be the biggest sadist and child abuser at the time, but it helped
and we survived. Unfortunately, we have not properly documented all this knowledge
of indigenous herbs and how and when to use them. We always thought they were
our herbs, in our forests and plains and they would remain there, the same,
forever. But globalisation changed all that.
Now African plants like aloe vera, used by generations to cure many ailments,
have been taken over by mainly US agricultural conglomerates, who patented
them and are growing them on a grand scale. They are refined and sold to the
whole world, including Africa, at criminally high prices. They grow in the
wild in Africa and need very little rain. If we start to grow them on a large
scale again, we should, in theory, generate enough money to buy food and medicines
and improve quality of life for HIV positive people. But fear is that huge
multinationals will once again play commodity and it will go the same way
as tea and coffee; both grown on a large scale in Africa with benefits that
are only reaped by the people who do not sow.
