Yet he dutifully and meticulously went about practising his art of healing—from the common cold to severe malaria; from ordinary headache tomigraine; from menstrual pain to the inability of a woman to bear children, PapaOsei was the first person residents of the village contacted for help. In time hisname spread far beyond the boundaries of our small village as the sick travelledmany kilometres to consult him.
The villagers who consulted him hoped and prayed that he would find solutionsto their problems. They hoped to be spared the need to travel to Nkawkaw,a town located about thirty kilometres away. That was where the next hospitalwas located.Others chose to bypass Nkawkaw and travel about twenty kilometres further,to Atibie. The reason they gave for this was that the latter generally charged lowerfees as compared to the former.
Taking the sick to hospital was something the villagers did as a last resort, notonly on financial grounds. Even if one were financially in a position to do so, themeans of transportation could bring further difficulties. The village happened tobe located on a road linking two district capitals. Every morning about half adozen vehicles travelling in both directions passed by. Often there were no seatsor only a couple of seats left by the time they got to the village.
After the ‘morning rush-hour’ hardly any more vehicles passed by until late inthe evening. That was the time when the vehicles that passed in the morning werereturning from their destinations.Even in this the people at Mpintimpi were somewhat fortunate, for elsewherethere were villages that had no roads linking them. Those villagers had to carrytheir sick on makeshift stretchers to the next available road to catch the next vehiclewhich may or may not arrive that day!
There was a third factor in the calculation. The villagers were small-scale farmers.They grew what they ate and ate what they grew. Accompanying the sick tohospital could cost them a whole day’s work on their farms. They could not boastof any government agency that would compensate for the loss.
My arrival on this planet did not affect any existing statistics. Why not? Theanswer is simple. My birth, like many others that occur in rural areas of Ghana(the same could be said about many parts of the developing world) was not registered.Needless to say, no one issued my parents with any birth certificate. Withoutany official document at hand, my date and place of birth went through severalalterations, depending on who was filling a form on my behalf at a particular time.
The fact that I did not possess a birth certificate was not an issue until I arrivedin Germany. All of a sudden, issues like date of birth, birthday celebrations, birthcertificates and so forth assumed a different level of importance! I had no choicebut to instruct my brothers to help get me a birth certificate.
Even before I had the time to familiarize myself with the planet I had electedto visit, something happened to threaten to cut short my stay here. I was barelyeight months old at the time. As any child born into the harsh environment Ihave described will tell you, right from the word go we were exposed to all kindsbacteria, viruses, parasites—too numerous and too varied to list here. They couldbe found in abundance in the water our parents gave us to drink; there werehordes of them in the atmosphere waiting for their chance to attack through anyopenings in the skin, minute or large or both; and then there were the innumerablespecimens that sought entry into our bodies by means of the very air webreathed!
As if these enemies were not enough, the ubiquitous mosquitoes also introduceddeadly plasmodium parasites en mass into our bloodstream.I did quite well in the initial stages warding off one onslaught of germ attackafter the other—but on one occasion the microscopic soldiers defending me succumbedto a horde made of millions of bacteria which attacked me from the leftside of my neck! This initially resulted in a small boil. In time the swellingincreased in size. Ultimately, not only did it threaten to choke me, it also threatenedto poison my whole body system as it kept on pouring trillions upon trillionsof bacteria into my bloodstream.
There is a common belief that persists to this day in my culture to the effectthat handling boils is not the speciality of conventional medicine! Mother andfather decided therefore to resort to traditional medicine. Nevertheless, thisshowed no sign of being capable of managing the situation, for the boil continuedto grow and grow in size. The little me was dying!
‘Why didn’t your parents use a razor blade, for example, to cut the boil opento allow the pus to empty?’ someone might ask.Good advise, friend! Don’t afford blame to them, though, for not having hadthe courage to do so. Indeed, one can only applaud them—considering whatthose two simple farmers could achieve in life with the scant resources at theirdisposal! Hats off to them!This time round, however, Papa Osei was at his wit’s end in his attempts tohelp me.
Just before all involved in the fight were close to throwing in the towel, someonedirected my parents to a traditional healer at Afosu, a comparatively largersettlement about six kilometres to the south of Mpintimpi. My parents hurried tothe traditional healer, mother bearing me tenderly in her arms.
‘Very serious, very serious!’ the healer shook his head as soon as he saw me.‘The next few hours will decide whether your little child will survive or not.’Imagine the effect of his words on my despairing parents! A few minutes later heleft for the woods. He returned after a while with some herbs in a small bag. Hepounded these into a paste and applied it to the boil.In the meantime I could hardly breathe and the battle was going terriblyagainst me. The three adults watching my struggle with death could hardly suppresstheir tears.
Then came the turning point! All of a sudden, as if an invisible hand had usedan invisible instrument to cut it open, the boil literally exploded!During mother’s lifetime she always had difficulty holding back her tearswhenever she came to this point in the narration. According to her, so much pusissued from the boil that for a while it looked as I would drown in it!And so—praise the Lord!—I was soon on the way to recovery.
