You are listening to Herzenssache, project whispers with Madamfo Ghana, the podcast that takes you to Ghana.
Christine and Bettina tell moving stories, chat about their personal experiences and share them.
Come with us on this special journey. Let's go!
Hello and welcome to episode 5. We are glad that you tuned in again.
I am Christine. I am Bettina.
Today it's about something that would interest me.
Last week we heard that you had realized this project with the fountain in Apevou.
What an exciting story.
Yes, it is very eye-catching, I'll actually show it.
The point is that the fountain was made for 200 people.
But sometimes there are situations where you say, I have to take action because of an individual's fate.
Because it affects me so much or because I say that if I don't do anything about it, things will get even worse for the person.
And then he might even die.
Can you think of someone right now that you would say, I would like to tell you about their fate?
Because maybe that's a bit like that.
But this represents many other fates that simply happen in Ghana.
Yes, that's right.
There are many that come to mind.
But especially because we went pretty deep last time, like in my first visits to Ghana,
I am reminded of our good friend Steven, Steven Owusu.
Unfortunately, he has since passed away, but the story happened almost 20 years ago.
And that was one, yes, one of those individual fates where you, what you simply mentioned,
that at that time, all of us and especially me, just wouldn't let go and that had to be helped.
And that was, so to speak, just one.
It is always said in development cooperation that there should be this level of benefit
give, so of course help as many people as possible with as little money as possible.
That is clearly logical, that makes sense.
But then you have these individuals.
Like you and me, individual people, where you just have to leave your beaten path to help.
individuals.
And what about Steven or how old was he and what exactly does he have?
As you say, I had to help urgently.
Steven lived in the neighboring village of APU.
And I remember how I first became aware of him, Emmanuel.
And I was visiting the neighboring village.
So there at Legbo Sonschi in the Erschandte region I had basically set up my base camp in APU.
Me and my German.
Opened and I went with Emmanuel to the neighboring village,
probably either to buy something or to visit someone or something.
And then we passed by his hut and it smelled so terrible.
And the whole atmosphere around it.
You notice when you get somewhere and something isn't right.
So now, of course, I am also a nurse.
Sure, I can easily identify some smells.
And then I wondered what was going on.
Emmanuel translated for me, of course, as my twin was clearly not good enough.
And then they said in the hut, there is a man and he stinks so much.
And then I put two and two together for myself,
because tropical heat and inflamed wounds are not a good combination.
So this episode is just a bit of disslamour.
We will of course speak in pictures, but it is really about
People who are seriously injured and just really not well.
So if this is something that really touches your heart , then maybe turn it off now.
Because reality is reality and I'm just trying to describe it as best I can.
So she is this man who stinks so much.
And in this compound house, in the village in Ghana, the houses have a certain structure.
They are simply built with a courtyard in a square,
that there are small doors between the buildings,
so that no wild animals, I mean snakes and things like that, can crawl into this courtyard.
I think the courtyard is the right choice.
You have to imagine it a bit like a four-sided farm we have here, yes, okay, all around too.
And then you can't do that.
Exactly, so you have to get a compound house like this on the
Just look at the photos on the website if you can't imagine what it looks like.
And then we found his wife there, so to speak, and of course
almost 20 years now, I no longer remember the detailed conversations.
But she said she would just push it in a basket
always the food over like that because it just smells so terrible.
And then I went to him in his little room, yes, and
then I found him and one of his legs had rotted off.
Really rotten, rotten.
He was wearing shorts and one leg was just normal
Leg, also a little swollen, as if you have water in your leg.
And the other one was black from the foot onwards, black like charcoal.
So I thought, if I knock on it like that, maybe it will break off.
Really charred like that.
And the whole leg was black and blistered and stuff.
And I just talked to him.
Immanuel translated, so it was really unbearable because
You also saw how much pain he was in.
And sitting there alone and smelling so terrible.
Immanuel couldn't come in at all.
Well, not because I ’m some kind of heroic person, but if you
If you're a nurse, you're just used to certain things.
Otherwise you won’t be able to do this job.
I have all my colleagues, the nurses, who I hope will listen.
And we just found out.
And I followed this along because I then asked him how this happened.
It doesn't happen overnight or anything.
So he probably stepped on something at some point.
They also walk a lot barefoot or just in these slippers, cello-whitey-sci-cin,
which we are called, the ones like flip-flops, between the toes, like plastic slippers.
Flippflops, Flippflops, genau.
Hay, German.
Hey, German is flip-flops in Ghana cello-whitey.
And he must have stepped on something and then he had an ascending infection in his foot.
It's like when someone steps on something, it gets infected and it just doesn't get treated.
And it is not treated because?
In this case, APU, follow, fire and listen to the follow, in the middle of Nierenburg there was nothing.
There was a small bush clinic there, but the
The measures that can be taken are, of course, minimalist.
So minimalistic that if you haven’t seen it yourself,
You also ask yourself why not and then you can do something and so on.
That's easier said than done, I guess.
There are simply many obstacles on the way that make such a
Treatment can simply be hindered - in this case, it's simply logistics.
A second giant stone simply cash, money, pay.
There is no medical certificate where you can say, now my doctor and
I'm going to see a specialist now and then I'll go there and then he'll.
Exactly, and above all, the treatment is free if you have insurance.
Dana has introduced health insurance.
As I said, the story happened almost 20 years ago now.
Nowadays, there is health insurance that covers certain things and things like that.
But this system is simply not as good as ours and even
In ours there are many holes where patients simply fall through.
But in this case, this Steven was just in his hut with a severed leg and was there.
I thought, I don’t even know what I was thinking anymore,
but we can't leave it like that and I felt so sorry for him.
In Ghana and in many countries , in such societies,
I would say that survival depends on helping one another.
So as a community you are strong and alone you will perish.
Now he was sitting there alone, terminally ill, are you alone and terminally ill?
How awful is that? Both of them are absolutely awful.
And then I said, we have to take him to the hospital, he has to be treated, he's dying.
He will definitely die from this infection.
And that was, yes, I am somehow speechless myself, because when you think about how old I was then,
I was not an experienced surgeon or anything, I am 50, I have 30 years
worked in the emergency room, I can operate, I have knowledge.
Well, I have a super solid education, I have worked for a long time in the
I also worked in the emergency room, but there are limits to my knowledge there.
Plus the environment, plus not my country, plus no infrastructure, no car, no emergency doctor, no ambulance.
Where is the nearest hospital? Who can even treat something like this?
Yes, that was terrible.
Yes, a huge challenge that we mastered, so we have
Of course we asked around and so on and it was clear that he had to go to Kumasi,
you can look at the map , a world trip back then, because no
Road, no public transport, no car, who doesn't have a car?
Keyword: no road, we basically cobbled one together for the fountain.
Yes, so we needed a car that we could borrow, so
a taxi, any car that can get there, but can't.
So, this hut was in the neighboring village of APU, which means we had to go from this
Village walk to APU and from APU, Google Maps, our best friend could look,
this crater path, up this mountain.
With one seriously injured person.
So we did what we did a lot at the time when I was working there, from the
next hut, which had a door that not many had,
a door unhinged, as a stretcher.
So Steven was dragged to the door and through the bush, heaved, that
you can, so you can now use Marathon as a comparison,
so and then you have to imagine that people didn’t want to come near it. So first I have to
convince them that they will help at all, that they will carry it, that they will participate,
and then it wasn't clear to the people there, what is that now?
They also thought that it would be less contagious , but is it perhaps also an evil spell?
Is this something that will have a negative impact on me, on my family, can I get it too?
So I want to stay away from it, I don't know what it is.
Well, that alone was a herculean task.
And then, to lift someone up because of the pain they're in, you can't even give them paracetamol.
He would have needed morphine, yes, but where would he have gotten it if not by stealing? That's unbelievable.
Then we lifted it to Morontour, you can also see that, that is the first village up at Lake Grata,
and then we had to find a car that would take him.
He has, well, quite awful to talk about the people like that, but the
it stank, so bad that you had to throw up, a rotten leg,
Nobody wanted to take him with them, nobody wanted to go there, so we moved heaven and earth,
and really there is a Samarita taxi driver, he has a caravan, Opel Caravan,
We could get around that, he could n't sit, he couldn't bend his leg or anything like that,
then we put it in there, and then Emanuel and I
and the taxi driver with his head out the window drove away.
Because you just can't handle it.
How bad for Steven, if you yourself turn away like that,
because you stink so much, because you are so stupid, because you have such a gun from sports, and then say, I smell,
but sleeps, somehow, and then your boyfriend says, or you, right?
And.
How terrible, how he must have felt, unbelievable, and well,
then we are just there a half day journey back then, because even from Morontour is not like that now,
that there is a highway leading to Kumasi, then you first have to go from Morontour to Bekwai,
from there to Kumasi, and then to the biggest hospital, comes in front of the Nozsche Teaching Hospital,
then we were there at some point, then nobody wanted to treat him,
because otherwise he now out of money also now us not out of the
pockets swelled, and then of course he drank there too.
And nobody wanted to do that either.
So it works, you can really say that I have heaven and hell in the law of motion
and rehearsed such a rebellion, and everyone who knows me personally knows
that I can be serene if something needs to be done now until we find someone,
who took care of him, I'll call it that, yes, and then it was clear,
that the enemy's legs are amputated, yes, the Tiven had to think about that first,
because we are now talking about a person who is not familiar with all these terms, yes,
and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, or in an evil way, or anything else,
simply the reality, he has led a completely different life , he has never been in such a huge hospital,
something should be amputated, something should be cut off, maybe it can still be healed, I mean,
for each of us who is listening or watching this and thinking, they want to amputate my fingers,
So think about it, you allow it a hundred times, so you let it happen to you,
and what kind of pain he had, then they gave him painkillers and so on for the first time,
that he could even breathe or something, and then they took him, I don't even know if he was first taken to a city,
I can't remember if he had to be taken to a ward and then operated on,
Well, I know that, but what the next two, three, four hours were like, I don't remember.
but then I know, the doctor said, there is also a big chance that he won’t think about it,
because he was no longer the youngest, and thus such a difficult story,
Something has gone wrong during the operation before , you could bleed to death or something.
Exactly, I then spent the night with Emanuel at a pastor’s house, whom I also knew from the APU area.
and I remember exactly, in this room that they gave me,
with the bed that reminds you of Ghana, you probably have that there too
already seen, they have such strange lamps sometimes,
it was a blue light, they don't have any real lights, I mean, I'll say white,
I mean, normal light bulb, I say, but I say
times, we may know this outside of disco or from something like that,
a club or something, so green, green light bulb, blue, so dim, so dim, yes, yes.
I couldn’t sleep all night because I just
didn't know how and where, so just what happens to that,
and does he survive, and was that the right thing we did and so on, and then we went there the next day,
and I can't remember why, but I know that the gates were somehow locked,
I don't know if it was perhaps not visiting hours, so they didn't want us,
and I wanted to know if he was alive, if he survived, if he was OK and so on,
and then I climbed over those gates in the hospital, I can still remember it really well,
people all wrote, I want to go to Steven now, and then we found him on the station,
and he had survived it, and they all did well
made, of course antibiotics, and so on, that was all available,
I will never forget how he hugged me, and he lay
in a room, now of course the smell was better,
because the bad leg was gone, and I will never forget, there were really seriously ill people next to him,
In this room, there is not just one room, but 20 people lying there, and some of them are on crutches,
and they hugged me and thanked me for him and so on, I could still cry now, it was so unbelievable,
so that has, yes, our appearing person has simply his life
saved, and he then received a prosthesis,
Or did he always use crutches, or how was it then?
It really healed, I then bandaged the stump, and of course I flew back home,
At that time I had not always lived there, we had this little bush cliff,
They then took care of his, and it took quite a while because it was so inflamed,
but as tin, thank God , everything healed well, and
he's on crutches, he's on crutches, so go,
help, under the arm, so not exactly, the smell under the arm, the
stuck there like that, he is always back and forth between the villages,
and was able to really participate in life again and so on,
and then even had a daughter with his wife,
and they called her Bettine, and yes, he has,
So through this our action, so my grandmother I know,
She then collected money for him on his birthday, for the operation, and as I said, again all gift money,
It wasn’t a big Madamfo yet, we’re making a call for donations,
but donated money, and many people collected
and that just saved his whole life and changed his whole life, right?
Yes, of course.
And if you just break it down, because somewhere
someone stood up to help someone somewhere,
so you know?
Mhm.
So much for individual assistance.
Yes, exactly.
And then I read something about a
small child who was so burned, you always helped,
So there are always things where you say, yes, I can't leave it like that, basically,
Madamfo supports Ghana on a large scale, I would say, for more and more people,
but there are also occasional cases where you
says, yes, no, now I have to spend some money,
You have to help those people because otherwise your life is kind of over, right?
Yes, exactly.
And I always think that one thing is good, that we are so well networked locally and really look
so where is the thing now, that we are not being ripped off, right?
Yes, done.
So that people really watch, so you need that now
really and the operation is necessary and now we have, of course,
yes, we are simply blessed with resources where we
Doctors have, where we say, man, please look at the case,
the operation must be done.
We even once had a child with the help of another foundation,
Tulissa, had to be flown to Kenya because she needed heart surgery,
that simply wasn't possible in Ghana.
And that’s clear, one person so to speak, but then you look around
or look in the mirror and say, yes, a human being, I am also a human being.
So, and you always have to think, somehow I could maybe be that person myself,
where I'm happy if someone helps me, right?
That's why I think it's actually okay to say, we're going to save this one now.
And now I'm doing something about it.
That was the moving story of Steven Owusso.
Yes, once again a very interesting story and very moving.
And yes, we look forward to you tuning in again next time and wanting to hear a new story.
Exactly.
And we'll take a look, especially with the medical stuff, just look at our website, madamfo-ghana.de.
Just click through our projects, there are these
medical emergencies, where we also make wooden chairs and things like that,
just for individual fates.
And always check out Instagram and Facebook, because we also present things like this there,
because this is also the case with individual donations for specific helpers.
Exactly. And very importantly, just write to us what else interests you,
where you actually want to experience it, where you think,
oh man, what is it like in Ghana?
And I would like to know more about that.
Then write to us at podcast@madamfo-ghana.de.
Exactly, great that you didn't forget that.
Yes, write to us, get in touch with us.
We are looking forward to the next episode and of course to seeing you.
So take care, see you soon.
Bye!