I’ve seen the aftermath. Ghana West Africa was a surprisingly non-violent place but one day I was in the capitol, Accra, and I seen a skinny, dirty man in his thirties walking along the sidewalk, one hand pressing against a long horizontal slit to his belly through which a loop of cut intestine protruded. In his other hand he held a gourd which he filled with water from the gutter.
Africa does have mentally ill, and like here they often become homeless.
Myself and a Ghanaian guy on the street looked on appalled as the man returned to a small, disused corrugated Metal shed. We went in and the whole place reeked of dried blood, bloodstains splattered on the walls.
We helped the guy, who was stoically silent throughout, to the street and tried to flag down a taxi (mostly small import sedans), none would put the guy in their vehicle.
Eventually an army LandRover passed by, and the soldiers reluctantly put him on the floor in back and drove us onto their base, dropped us off inside a building at the gate, and left.
The whole time the wounded guy was suffering in silence, holding his slit belly.
Some time later different soldiers came and drove us to the city hospital, the whole event took about three hours.
At the hospital, like everyone else we met in this ordeal, they acted awkward and embarrassed. Everyone WOULD have helped the guy if they could but had very little resources to do so. Even at the hospital supplies were short and the need great, and this was just a beggar off the street, a human stray dog.
We left him there at the hospital, they did give him a shot of penicillin before we left, I hope they also had painkillers.
Just like everyone else, I WOULD have helped him more but had very little resources to do so. Or so I felt at the time.
