First Aid, Village Style

I have been enjoying my new roommate, a Public Health graduate student from Seattle University. We have kept ourselves supremely busy with, among countless other things, outreach clinics and teaching first aid lessons to my health club students. It has been a great joy to see these students genuinely interested in knowing how to help fellow students or community members in the event of an emergency. It has been interesting trying to adapt American first aid curriculum to village life. For example, calling 911 or “waiting for help to arrive” doesn’t really apply when you are 12km from the nearest paved road.

We try to bring up a lot of discussion during the lessons to find out what the students already know and to answer questions about traditional or local remedies that they may have seen. In a lesson about fainting I asked anyone in the class if they have experienced fainting or witnessed someone faint. One of my very dear students admitted that she had fainted but did not want to share her story. Another girl piped in that she had seen it happen and was willing to share the story. She began to explain… “Bilha was being caned by one of our teachers, and suddenly went limp and fell to the ground.” For those of you who do not know what “caning” is, it is a harsh form of corporal punishment where teachers use a large stick or ruler to beat the students. I have been lucky enough to not have witnessed this, but I absolutely crumbled to pieces inside imagining my sweet student being beat to the point of losing consciousness.

Natalie and I spent yesterday organizing the clinic’s supply room and ended up stocking the treatment rooms with missing items. It was a good thing that we did because despite being a very slow day, we had two interesting wound cases. I sometimes feel like MacGyver trying to turn saline, iodine, and gauze into a magical wound healing dressing. I guess that’s just life in the village.

Community outreach in my village