First Aid- Ugandan Style

Today I spent a couple of hours teaching first aid to the maintenance team at Watoto Church. Teaching first aid here is a whole different ball game than teaching it in North America.
In North America, when a person comes upon a serious medical situation, the first order of business is to have someone call 911 and get help coming. In Uganda there is no 911 system. There are ambulances, but you may wait a very long time for them to arrive, if they arrive at all.
After a serious injury or medical situation, a North American trip to the hospital will take place in either an ambulance or a car/truck/van. The likelihood is very high that a Ugandan trip to the hospital will include a boda boda (motorcycle taxi)- especially if time is critical. Bodas are the fastest mode of transportation because they weave in and out of the traffic and don’t obey any traffic laws. However, with a broken limb or a snakebite, I can’t imagine that the trip would be very pleasant. Actually, I can’t imagine that any boda ride would be pleasant, but less so when in a medical emergency.
I have learned several new remedies- some useful and some…well, I’ll tell you about them and you can decide if you want to try them.
I have had to spend some time learning about my least favourite of all God’s creations- snakes. I have never taken a first aid course or taught anything about what one should do if you are bitten by a cobra, black mamba or puff adder. All of a sudden, that has become relevant information that should be taught in a basic first aid course and I needed to do some quick research.
The first recommendation is that you try to determine what kind of snake bit you. Even if I saw one, I wouldn’t know what it was- OK, if a cobra puffed up and spit, I would recognize that. However, I have mistakenly assumed that a black mamba was black in colour- wrong. The inside of its mouth is black, but who wants to get that close- I don’t want to check it for tonsillitis! The colour of the black mamba is actually dark green or brown.
The first aid is different for someone who is has been bitten by a black mamba than it is for someone who has been bitten by a puff adder. One of the readily accepted first aid treatments for snakebites is to apply a tourniquet above the bite to stop the venom from spreading to the rest of the body. I now know this would be useful if bitten by a puff adder whose venom travels in the blood stream, but would be useless in the bite of a black mamba whose venom attacks the nervous system.
OK enough about snakes- I get all crawly every time I even talk about them!
I did get a few new first aid/health tips from the class that I had not heard before. Pretty sure I will not be using any of them, but I will give you a couple of them in case you are ever in a tight spot.
When we were discussing burns, several remedies were discussed. These included applying Vaseline, butter, cooking oil to the burn. I didn’t find this one all that alarming because that was what I was taught as a child- burn yourself while cooking, slap some butter on it. Of course we now know that is the worst thing you can do. I proceeded to teach that the burn should be put in cool water for 10 to 15 minutes. Then I was presented with a whole new treatment- don’t use water, use urine as it works much better. Normally, I like to refute inaccurate information with facts, evidence based research, but instead I just stood there with my mouth open. Hey- is anyone out there doing a degree and you need a research topic- how about researching the effectiveness of urine vs water in small burns.
Then once we were on the topic of urine, the discussion just went downhill from there. I was then informed that urine works well for a hangover. I naively asked, “So you get up the next morning and drink your urine.” They all laughed at me and informed me that of course you don’t drink your own urine, it has the alcohol in it that you are trying to get rid of- you drink SOMEONE ELSE’S urine.
Every day is a learning experience here.