Stitching up a wound

Just as we finished Sunday lunch we got a knock at the door. On Sundays, we get together for a little church service as a family, then we go down to the stream for a paddle and we come back for a sit-on-the-floor finger-food lunch. That’s a settled routine for us, and just as it finished there was a knock at the door. A friend informed us that someone had been cut and we needed to come and see it.

We grabbed some medical “things”, rummaging amongst our supplies for helpful-looking things like bandages and gauze. When we saw the wound we were initially at a loss about what to do. I’ve put a picture of the wound we were confronted with at the bottom of the post – be warned not to scroll too far if you don’t want to see it! You can see the Kovol first aid idea of applying tourniquets above and below to slow the bleeding.

The cut was about an hour old and the bleeding had slowed down. We put gauze on it and wrapped it up. Having not needed to deal with a wound like this before we wanted to double-check with our medical clinic what to do. We knew suturing was possible, but when should we do that? We’d need to wash the wound to do that, but there was still fresh bleeding and we weren’t sure how to do things.

We went back to call our clinic and got the story on the way so we’d have the details to give to the clinic if asked. The man had been cut during an argument. He was holding his machete and raised it up when tensions arose. The other man grabbed the machete too and in the wrestling back and forth, it whipped around and cut his bicep.
The discussion was over his treatment of his wife. This guy has ruined his mind with drugs so that he can’t think straight. For years he has been abusing his wife and children who have gone on the run after he cut his wife in the neck with a machete. A family from another village had been secretly sheltering the wife, and now there were some discussions to “finish the heavy”.
The guy who was cut is not very popular around here and he’s been regularly intimidating others in his quest to get his wife back.

The story below is a version I got from a friend. You can see the red underlining where we’re still working on our spellcheck. We need to add the words to our spell check manually because of course a Kovol spell check doesn’t come preinstalled 🙂

After having a chat with our nurse in the clinic and getting the doctor’s advice we went back to suture the wound up. We opened up our suture kit and we did our best. In 2016 we had a bit of suture training where we practised on some chicken thighs with cuts in them. That was a long time ago though! It’s a good thing the Kovol people are so tough and pain-tolerant! We did our best.

I had a go at it. I got the needle and thread in, but went ahead and pulled the thread all the way through. Oops! Then Gerdine took over and things went a lot more smoothly. We had to contend with heavy rain, dogs licking the blood that ran onto the ground and two bored 3-year-olds who kept asking to go home. We didn’t manage a very sterile job! If there’s a next time we have a much better idea of how to go about it. It’s funny how parts of the training started coming back to us after we had finished!

With no child care and both myself and Gerdine required to do the suturing our kids had to keep themselves amused close by and were real troopers over the 3 hours it took us to control the bleeding, clean the wound and suture it.

I’ve been checking in with the guy and checking his wound every day since. The wound seems to be healing well. While chatting with a family nearby this week an old lady said “Usually when there’s a big cut like that it gets infected and the person dies, but now we have the white people here”. On the first day, I took the opportunity to rebuke the guy as strongly and clearly as I could for his treatment of his wife. I told him to abandon his attempts to get her back and to force the village court system to send her home with him. He thanked me and then continued talking about how he was going to fix the problem. He never cut his wife he said, he just wanted to scare her, but the knife turned and cut her. It was sadly clear that he was not listening, perhaps not able to listen.
Today as I changed his dressing he was telling me how good it would be if he had a gun because then he could look after us well and “get” the bad people. I’m glad we don’t have guns here! It’s not a surprise to see that he’s being left on his own. There aren’t any brothers or friends staying with him.
Our heart goes out to his poor wife who is still on the run!

It’s been a busy week for medical cases. While attending a village meeting in another village I was rushed to see a sick lady who looked very miserable. I suspect she has a kidney infection. As I was heading home for medicine I was diverted into a house to see a sick girl who probably had malaria. Arriving home I found Gerdine dealing with medical cases: a malnourished boy, a head injury, and a boy with a broken shoulder bone/ligament from a falling banana tree. I had to leave her to it, while I consulted our medical books for my own cases.
I took Oscar and Millie with me for the return journey to the other village to lighten Gerdine’s load, much to Alice’s tears and complaints because she wanted to come too! Unfortunately it would be too tough a hike to carry both twins at the same time.
Once again Oscar and Millie watched as I talked, tested for malaria (it was +ve) and took care of people.

After hiking home wet from the rain I felt it was time for a bit of fun. Oscar and I loaded up our Minecraft world on the computer and had some fun exploring until Gerdine interrupted me. A good friend of ours had stomach pain, severe enough that it kept him up at night.
I spent an hour with him and came to suspect a stomach ulcer. He was asking for medicine, but chronic conditions aren’t on our list of cases that we help with. He’d already been to the hospital and they had sent him away empty-handed. To avoid giving medicine I spent a long time talking it through with him to show him care and help him feel he was well looked after. I translated on the fly for him the page in our medical book on the subject, advising him to eat little and often, drink A LOT and to give up smoking. Try those things first and come back and see us again if it doesn’t improve I said.

We’re glad to serve people as we can. We grieve for so many cases where we can’t help because we’re lacking in knowledge or we’ve decided as a team that we won’t be taking care of that sort of case. It’s a safety mechanism to try to safeguard our time and remain focused on language learning. The need feels overwhelming at times.

It’s times like this we focus on serving God one day at a time. I have a language test in 2 weeks and this week is one of those weeks where I feel like my language ability is getting worse! It’s a constant up and down of confidence and seeing my ability improve to days of feeling like I’m regressing. After all these years of language study am I going to stumble during the test to demonstrate that I’ve made no progress in speaking ability in 8 months? Is the guy we just stitched up going to return to abusing his wife? Will he get into another fight? Are we making any difference at all?
To such thoughts, we just remind ourselves that this is where God has us right now. I’ll get stuck back into language study today as that’s where he has me. If he calls me to something else tomorrow then these years of serving God here are a valuable act of worship. Walking with the Lord today, not the final outcome, is the most important thing.