Salt in Wounds

In the US we have all heard the saying, “pouring salt in my wound”. We know it means that someone is adding insult to injury, that they are really getting you while you are down. I was trying to explain this to Mrs. Kapuwe on our morning run a few weeks back. The whole conversation was a result of a situation at the clinic the day before…

Our clinic is still struggling to handle healthcare for the 8,000+ people in the catchment area. We have had no nurse since Mrs. Mpongo’s death last year. I had organized a follow up HIV/AIDS testing at the clinic, which meant that multiple nurses had come from the district offices to the village for the event. It was God’s timing that this all happened on this particular day.

Mid-way through the group counseling sessions an ox-cart carrying a woman pulls into the clinic yard. She is carried into our clinic and into the back room where I was setting up testing kits. One of the visiting nurses moves everyone out of the room but asks me to stay in the room and help her. The woman had given birth the night before and had serious tearing and hemorrhaging from the birth. She had lost a significant amount of blood. The nurse said she was probably within hours of death if we did not take care of her immediately. The nurse got a needle and what looked like very thick fishing wire and asked me to hold this woman on the bed while she sewed her up. We had no medicine whatsoever at the clinic, so this woman is getting sewn together after just having given birth without the use of any painkillers. It was barbaric. It was the only thing we could do.

I cannot say enough about the strength of African women. Their physical, mental, and emotional stamina is unbelievable. The woman whose arms I held just set her jaw and dealt with the pain and squeezed my hand. When it was all finished and the bleeding had stopped, she literally jumped down from the bed, dressed herself and started the walk back to her house. Before leaving the nurse told her she needed to rinse with water and put salt into the area on a daily basis. Seriously, that was the advice she gave her. Pour salt in your wounds.

Mrs. Kapuwe confirms that pouring salt in wounds really does help keep infections away. How blessed are we as Americans that our experience with salt in wounds is merely an expression, a way to better clarify our emotional state? Give it up for the Africans who pour salt on everything-from colored greens to wounds. You do what you have to do.