“A violent virus”: views from Ebola’s ground zero
by Julia Belluz
Vox.com
August 1, 2014
Aid worker Ishmeal Alfred Charles says getting abducted as a child soldier during Sierra Leone’s bloody civil war when he was 15-years-old was less scary than living there now under the Ebola threat.
“You knew the rebels were coming,” said the Freetown native in a recent interview from Sierra Leone, where he is among hundreds of aid workers trying to beat back the deadly virus in what is now the biggest-ever outbreak and the first to hit West Africa. “They’d attack a town, and so you made a move. You knew to hide.”
Now, he can’t flee. It’s too expensive to fly elsewhere. And he can’t hide from an enemy that could be lurking anywhere. Instead, he has stopped shaking people’s hands and he installed a hand-washing station—a bucket filled with chlorinated water—outside his house.
“You don’t know if the person you’re sitting next to is infected with Ebola, so all you’re trying to do is be as conscious as you can. Because we have heard of situations where whole families get infected… and you lose everyone in the family.”
For most people, Ebola is a distant threat, a nightmarish word that conjures up images of sudden and violent hemorrhaging. But for West Africans like Charles, it’s now an everyday possibility. “Wherever you go—on Facebook, in the community, on the phone, in Whatsapp messages—people are talking about Ebola.”
As a program manager with the Catholic aid agency Caritas, Charles now works to educate people about a virus that only recently emerged in Sierra Leone. He goes door to door, school to school, church to church; he talks to everyone he can reach about the disease; and he hands out hand sanitizer and chlorine. Sometimes, he uses megaphones in town squares, relaying public-health messages about sanitation and prevention. It’s a tedious process, he says, but it’s necessary.
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