Challenges Experienced by the Sick Girl | Memories We lost

Write a composition on the challenges experienced by the sick girl and her family members citing illustrations from the short story Memories we lost by Lidudumalingani Mqombothi.

 Introduction

Mental health problems bring along with them a myriad of challenges. The patients and the people around them cope with problems such as injuries, ignorance and misdiagnosis. This is illustrated in the short story Memories we Lost

Mi) Firstly, illness makes the patient to run away from home in the middle of the night. The mother and the entire village are abducted from their sleep. Mean and boys organized a disoriented search party in small uncoordinated groups. Children are frightened. The entire village searches for her in the darkness facing the risk of plunging down a cliff. They would search and search for the whole night.

Mii) Secondly, the illness makes the patient injure herself and even hurt her sister. She smashes her head on the wall until she bleeds. Her terrified sister grabs her and tries to protect her but all I vain since she becomes quite strong. She cracks the wall open with her hand. This affects the narrator psychologically for some time. The narrator began to smell the bloodstain in her dreams, clothes and everything else.

Miii) Thirdly, The sick girl throws hot porridge on the sister and scalded her chest. The protective sister protects her by saying she accidentally poured hot water on herself. She had to run for safety when her sister had unconsciously flung the pot with hot porridge across the room. She did not mean to hurt her sister. She did it unconsciously since when she gained consciousness she is shocked and devastated. Had she known what she had done, she would never have forgiven herself.

Miv) Fourthly, The sister swings a desk across the room and smashes a window. She had smashed a chair against a wall and was screaming incoherent words. Her eyes are red. She only comes to her senses when she spots her sister in the crowd. The incident affects the narrator and goes truant from school. She feigns illness to stay at home with her sister. She tells her “I want to be in the same class with you”. They stay together doing sketches and the patient convinces the sister to go back to school and even coaxes her in a wheedling way. Over the years the girls missed so much school that her younger sister caught up and went two grades higher than her.

Mv) Lastly, the sisters are forced to run away from home when the narrator eaves drops on the mother planning to have her sister taken to a traditional healer named Nkunzi. He lives in a remote village some miles away from their home. He is famous for ‘baking’ mentally ill people claiming to cure them. He would make a fire from cow dung and weeds and then tie the ‘demon possessed’ person on zinc roofing and place it on fire. This brutal method resulted in death since the narrator does not know anyone who survived Nkunzi’s ‘baking’. They flee home at sunset. They wander far away from their village to a village she thinks is known as Philani. She takes her sister to hospital.

In conclusion, the writer has portrayed how sick people and those around them undergo many challenges.