A true story told to me by a woman in my village.
It is common knowledge that most Africans fear
and hate snakes, for example, I was traveling
back to my village in a taxi, when I spotted a snake on the road, I was super excited about it and told everyone
in the car about the snake; my mistake.
The taxi driver stops his car, throws it in reverse and runs over the snake,
all the while I am screaming at him in both English and Ewe to stop, to please not
do this. He picks the dead snake up carefully and puts it in his trunk so that
tomorrow he can sell it to the juju man.
My village knows that I like and
respect snakes, so they sometimes makes fun of me, which I don’t mind at all
since it is just another opportunity to educate them about the benefits of
snakes and why we should not kill each one that we encounter . About a month
ago, I noticed one of the primary school teachers was not showing up for class,
and I started to ask around where she was. I was then told that she had been
bitten by a snake and was recovering with the black rock. I was uncertain if I had heard that right,
black rock? What in the world could that mean?
I decided to take matters into my
own hands to go and visit her and ask her about what had happened. This is what
she told me “I was going to farm early morning, and started to get to work
before the heat of the day came. I was pulling weeds around my maize (corn),
when I bent down, I felt a sharp pain on my lower arm, and I looked down and
saw two holes. I knew that a snake had come and bitten me. I than dropped what I
was doing and ran to the medicine man. He looked at the wound and said that it
was a poisonous (venomous is the correct term) and I would have to try the black
rock”. I stopped her there and asked more about this black rock. She said that
the medicine man gets it from a special place and it takes the poisons from
your body. You must place it on your body, where it sticks till it has taken
out all the poisons, than drops off. You than take the rock and put it in milk
for 24 hours; I was unable to find out why, but it seems to help heal your body
completely. After the milk bath, she
said you take the rock and bury far from your house, to keep the poisons away.
That is the story of the black stone.
After hearing this, I had no idea
what to make of it, did this work? Where did this magical black rock come from?
How had they come to this discovery? Sorry to say, I was not able to talk to
the traditional medicine man before leaving again, but I will talk with him
when I get back to my village. After recounting this story to a fellow PCV,
they said it sounded a lot like a leach….and then it donned on me that, that
did sound plausible. I hope to soon bring this black rock tale to completion
with a talk to the medicine man and a viewing of the black rock its self.
No comments:
Post a Comment