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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.