My Rural Story

year old girls got hit on the back of the leg with a rugby ball and she started crying. We couldn’t work out why, the ball didn’t hit her that hard and she wouldn’t explain to us what happened. She turned around and she was bleeding quite profusely from the back of her leg through her shorts, but we couldn’t really touch her to see what was there. So, we took her to the Elder and asked her ‘what can we do? Something needs to be done.’ The Elder said to us, well, she didn’t really say to us, she said to the girl ‘just go home’. We had been to this girls house the previous day and she lived in a tin hut out on the reservationandwe knewthat noone would be home and that the home wasn’t

a sterile, safe environment for her, so we ended up taking her inside to the nurse and she dressed the wound up and gave her some pain killers for children and after that she was fine. She was running around on the basketball court and she was happy. It was a very rewarding thing for me, seeing that the girl was helped rather than sent back to her house where nothing could be done, and nothing would be done, and it got infected. So while it was really sad to see that that’s how they deal with those issues out there, it was also very rewarding to know that we were able to create a positive outcome for that girl.

@ElsevierAUS