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The boy in the Hospital Bed Kojo Njorfuni doesn�t look like someone who will survive another day. His breath seems to be failing, and as he struggles to breathe, you can count all his ribs without getting close to him. But the thirteen-year-old boy, who is paralysed from his waist downwards, has defied death and endured suffering with peerless stoicism. He even has hopes of getting back to school one day. Kojo�s ankles and knees are draped in white bandages, which are soaked with fluid discharges from his sores. As his father turns him over the bed to give a clear view of what he calls the �decay� of his lower back and buttocks, Kojo writhes as the rags which cushion him are all soaked with the discharge and hold on to the bandage. A urinary catheter is also inserted into him to drain urine from his bladder since he cannot visit the washroom. Kojo has been in the hospital for four months now and though the medical authorities speak of some improvement in his condition, his sores are far from being healed. The health authorities here say they don�t have the capacity to work on the cause of his paralyses � a fractured spine. So unlike other patients who see improvements in their conditions, Kojo and his family only hang on to faint hope, an expectation of some miracle. �Sometimes, I wish my son never stepped into the classroom. I would have preferred a son who could neither read nor write to the suffering Kojo is going through now,� Mr. Njorfuni Wajah, Kojo�s father, says, fixing a vacant and distant stare as if he�s trying to see beyond the wall of the hospital ward, back to the day it all started. It was a day he dreads to remember, but which he cannot forget. The Banda Tragedy Njorfuni Wajah did not go to farm on Friday, November 21, 2008. Quite apart from the fact that the dry season had set in and there was not much work to do, Friday is Njorfuni�s �bad day.� For many people with similar traditional beliefs, such days are sacred; they neither fish nor farm. On that uneventful morning, Njorfuni Wajah decided to meet a friend at the market square of Banda, a town in the Krachi West District of the Volta Region. His son, Kojo, had eaten his breakfast of rice bought from a nearby vendor and left for school. Sahadatu Ibrahim, a senior high school leaver, was the class three teacher of English Arabic Primary School in Banda in November 2008. There are only two trained teachers in the school � the headteacher and his assistant. The head teacher does not teach so the fate of the children of this school is left in the hands of some pupil teachers and volunteers from the community. The class three teacher had just finished marking the class register and gone to place it in the office when the unexpected happened. �It took all of us by surprise,� says Yeyie Sei Selisah, the assistant head teacher. �It had not rained in a long time. Neither was there a storm that day. All we saw was that the walls collapsed.� Why the building collapsed or how it collapsed, however, did not matter. What mattered most were the lives of the pupils, as teachers and older pupils made frantic efforts to rescue the victims. They were swift, but too late to save all of them. One pupil, Master Godwin Ayensu, who sat near the collapsed wall, died on the spot, while another pupil, Sumaila Labil, fell into coma. Others, including Kojo and Sumaila, had to be rushed to safety. Unfortunately for the children, the road from Banda to Krachi was (and still is) very deplorable and the absence of an ambulance meant that they had to make do with an equally deplorable benz bus. When Njorfuni Wajah heard that his son was among the children injured by the falling classroom wall, he made straight away for the Banda Health Post, where he was told that the children had been transferred to the Krachi Hospital. �Kojo did not look injured. No part of his body was bruised, and since he was not crying, we thought his was not as serious as the rest. For three days, the doctors saw nothing wrong with him, except that he said he could not sit or stand,� Kojo�s father recounts. �It was on the third day when I pressed my hand against his back that I realised his backbone had a problem.� Health authorities said the extent of injuries sustained by six of the children could not be treated there so they referred Kojo, together with five other pupils, to the Volta Regional Hospital in Ho. But the Krachi Hospital had no ambulance so they had to send for an ambulance from Ho. The ambulance arrived, after four days, the seventh day after the accident. Sumaila was still unconscious. Injured Children abandoned Kojo�s father said no official of the Ghana Education Service or the district assembly accompanied parents of the injured children to Ho. And since the parents were not financially prepared, they became stranded when the Volta Regional Hospital again referred them to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra. Mr. Kwaku Larbi, a presenter on GBC�s Volta Star Radio, said the plight of the children and their parents reached the station through someone and the station decided to appeal for funds to assist them. Kojo�s father said he had met an old friend who hinted him of possible help if the media were brought in. But the situation was so critical that the parents could not wait for external help. Kojo and Sumaila were, however, the only children whose parents were prepared to take them to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. The rest received treatment and left without the recommended surgeries. The reason was they didn�t have money. According to Njorfuni, an official of the GES gave Sumaila�s mother and him GH₵50 each, and apart from the ambulance, which was given by the hospital authorities in Ho, nobody offered them any help. Sumaila regained consciousness after almost two weeks. The health authorities at Korle-Bu said he needed to undergo a surgery but his mother said she could not afford it. When the physical condition improved, he left. But Kojo�s condition had worsened and he had to undergo the surgery. It was one month and three days after the wall collapsed and fractured his spine that Kojo Njorfuni had his spinal surgery at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. The appeal made on the Volta Star Radio had attracted the sympathy of the Krachi West Constituency Member of Parliament, Hon. Francis Osei-Sarfo, who according to Mr.Kwaku Larbi, donated GH₵ 1000 to help in the treatment of the children. Mr. Larbi recalls that half of the amount was given for the treatment of Kojo while the rest was shared among the other victims. Kojo�s father has confirmed receiving that amount but stated that it was not enough. He said he sold almost all his valuable assets to survive the sixty-six (66) days he spent in the hospital with his son. But he was happy that after surgery, Kojo could sit and was doing well. That was, however, not the end of the story. Kojo was asked to return in six months for a medical review, and that was when trouble began.