The man that got the snake bite yesterday was discharged from the hospital this afternoon. He seems to be doing fine even though the hand with the snake bite is very swollen. We have never met this man; Divine brought him to the mission house because he wanted to thank us for the help. We told him that we would pass our thanks on to those who help us with “anti-snake venom medicine” and “whatever comes up”. Divine told him about the eggs inside the snake; he too was amazed.
Mr. Iddrisu has taken the next week off so he can harvest his soybeans. He planted the soybeans in Divine’s village. Divine harvested his last week. He said that he has been advising everyone to get the soybeans out of the fields because the dry season is here and if they get too dry the pods will burst open and the soybeans will be lost. He said that some are not taking his advice because they are afraid that we will still get more rain and they have no place in the dry to keep the beans. We are happy that Mr. Iddrisu is harvesting his. The plants are uprooted by hand and the whole plants are laid out on tarps or the bare ground to dry. The men do the uprooting; the women haul them to the drying place by hand and after they have dried the women use a long stick and beat the soybeans and dislodge the seeds from the pods then the soybeans have to be separated from the shells. There is a small tractor driven threshing machine that some men hire to make the thrashing process easier but at this time of the year the machine is in high demand.
Zorash alerted us to the case of a 16 year old boy that got shot in the hip during the Damba festival last week. The family took the boy to Yendi but they could not help him and could not dislodge the bullet. They then took him to Tamale. Evidently the bullet hit the hip / upper leg and the surgery is needed to remove the debris and to reconstruct the bones. We will help once the family figures out what they are going to do.
Steve spent the majority of the afternoon writing letters and gathering additional information for the Social Welfare report. The Tax Clearance Certificate should be ready to be picked up in a couple days.
Warihanna and her father came to the Child Center this morning. Warihanna is the young teenage girl with Osteomyelitis. Her father said that the doctor was not kind to them when they went back to let him know that the ulcer had come back. He said that amputation might be the only answer. We are worried that if they don’t remove the leg the infection will travel up the leg into other parts of her body. It can become life threatening.
Thank you for all you do for us and for the work.
In His Service,
Steve and Kandie
