By Farayi Mungoshi

MY Father recently underwent a head operation following the stroke he suffered in 2010.
After the operation the doctors recommended he goes into rehab to help get him back on his feet since he could not even walk or talk as fluently as we thought he would after the operation.
He checked into rehab, but would not stay long as he was not getting any better for all we know he was getting worse and he kept complaining about the treatment he was receiving, especially after having paid a reasonable amount to be there.
My mother, who is currently filming the movie Makunun’unu Maodzamoyo, was gutted since she had decided to take this opportunity to concentrate on the film with the understanding that there are people looking after him in rehab and that he was in safe hands.
She had to stop filming and return to town to remove him from the rehab and bring him home.
Not more than four days had passed when Baba started walking again.
We thanked and praised God for this.
So when I told another uncle of mine what had happened at the rehab and how we took father back home, he immediately said something striking and interesting that I had never thought about.
He said that these institutions are foreign to us and as such they are not as effective when we apply them.
I thought how true, immediately my mind raced back to the UK and I thought of the many people there that have taken up mental health and are working in the old peoples’ homes.
I know a few that actually want to come back home, but they find themselves in a fix, if they come back what do they do?
While we do have psychiatric hospitals, and old peoples’ homes, they are not as many as they have in the West.
Is it that we have lesser people with mental illnesses?
Or lesser old people in need of assistance?
Not at all, I believe that the reason behind it is that the family still plays a vital role in the lives of each individual within the family structure.
Family worries about one another and looks out for each other, instead of putting our elders in old peoples’ homes we fend for them and take care of them.
Immediately I started reflecting on what he was saying, and I was reminded of an earlier article I wrote in The Patriot on Chenjerai Hove, how his health was deteriorating in a hospital in Oslo, but upon the arrival of the mother of his children he got better, even the doctors decided to stop giving him the medication he was on sighting that she was all the medication he needed to make him better since his situation was already irreversible and the medication they had put him on was not making his situation any better.
I know this may sound crazy to most of you, but it’s a question of whether you have ever sat down and really thought about it — when family becomes medicine and medicine fails.
Our ancestors had a longer life-span than us today, mostly because of what we now take into our bodies and feed our minds.
We now take measures to protect ourselves from illnesses, we are not even sure we will ever suffer from.
Let me explain further.
A couple of days ago as I was meditating on this particular topic, I decided to ask a certain lady colleague who also happens to be a single mother whether she ever got her children injected for a particular disease before the child ever fell sick from that particular disease.
“Oh you mean have I ever got a child of mine vaccinated before?”
I stopped and smiled to myself, she had hit the nail to the head, vaccination, was the word and not injection.
“Yes, have you ever got your children vaccinated?”
“Yes against measles.”
I then asked her why she did this and she said, “Because I was told to do it.
“They said it was to protect my son from measles.”
I asked her if every child suffers from measles and if not then why would she subject her son to medication he doesn’t need.
She could not reply at first and then she went on to say, “What if he then gets the measles, they will say we told you.”
So we were dealing with ‘what ifs’.
What if he falls sick?
What if he doesn’t?
What if.
I felt that our minds are slowly being programmed to fear certain things that we never used to consider, and some might say it is because of the many foreign things, food, medicine etc that we now consume and know little about hence we depend on foreign knowledge.
We need to look back within ourselves, the answer is there and it is vital for the older generation to pass on as much information about the earth to the young ones so that we are not left open and vulnerable to other cultures, for them to come teach us how to treat ourselves when that information is there within the people.