By Umaru Fofana
The horizon is probably an 18-nautical-mile stretch. The Atlantic Ocean lies bare beneath the mountains and valleys that Freetown has and is. A beauty you cannot take away from this town named after freed slaves. Such is its epitome of freedom and liberty. That, it seems, is now in check in its track. Thanks to Ebola - a disease named after a river in Congo which comes nowhere near the abundance of hydro that Sierra Leone boasts of.
But in the V of the valleys overlooking a grey and hazy Freetown morning on Wednesday 29 October, I could barely see what greeted the mountains on this morning; as life begins for a people petrified by a virus that is barely conscionable or intelligent. How do you kill your host who must stay alive to keep you alive? I sometimes ask myself about the Ebola virus. Why does it kill its prey and not spare their life to keep itself alive. The virus dies once its victim dies – unless of course someone touches the corpse. Virus is all what it is.
As people started life in this town whose life even the dreaded Ebola cannot snatch away completely, the sirens started blaring even this early. I had to set off from home unusually early to join up with a colleague from The Times of London to visit Kerry Town, which, like Freetown was to slaves in the early 1800s, has come to be seen as the place with the answer to the puzzle of Ebola in Freetown and the rest of the country – British intervention.
That belief emanates from what the mountains exhibited yesterday morning. I saw helicopters hovering round in the V of the valleys. They were from the approaching Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Argus, the British naval boat coming to Sierra Leone as part of the former colonial master’s plan to “defeat” Ebola which has so far officially claimed over 1,000 lives from around 4,000 people who’ve contracted it. The exact figures are believed to be three times higher. And the virus is spreading even if its lethality is diminishing – or perhaps our health workers are getting better in handling it.
The helicopters bring to mind those ugly Chinooks which, vindicating Plato, looked extremely beautiful in the eyes of Sierra Leoneans. Like those helicopters hovering around today, the Chinooks darkened our skies in the late 1990s to brighten our lives as Britain stepped up efforts to end a brutal war and kill another kind of virus – the RUF rebels.
My early Wednesday morning drive to the far outer areas of Freetown came a day after a very low point in the recent scheme of things. It followed a disturbing day of news about how Ebola is eating into the human fabric of my country.
Tuesday 21st October = 72 new cases of Ebola reported in Sierra Leone. Wednesday the 22nd, 50 new Ebola cases confirmed. Thursday the 23rd, 44 new lab-confirmed cases.Friday the 24th, 60 new cases.Saturday the 25th, 41 new cases.Sunday the 26th, 70 additional cases.Monday 27th, 62 new cases.Tuesday the 28th, 91 new cases.And on and on.
The numbers may be ebbing and flowing but one thing remains constant – that new cases are being recorded and more deaths are taking place. That is ill-affordable. The above numbers give us a daily average of 60 new infections in a country of around six million people. We cannot afford to have that go on for one day longer. The arithmetic is too clear for all to imagine the consequence. The consequence is too grim to not take a toll on the psyche of all of us.
Argus will be here as the Kerry Town Ebola and Community Treatment Centre is commissioned next week. During my visit there yesterday I saw an almost complete edifice. Particularly impressive was the 12-bed facility for health workers who may get sick. Stunning!
Argus itself will be here for months. But once Kerry Town is handed over – and it has been built quote quickly and nicely, where do we go. Treatment beds and health workers are two sides of the same coin. We cannot treat the sick even if all the doctors in the world unless we have a place to treat them. Once that place is ready the health workers are needed.
My understanding is that the British army medical team will leave or will not be involved in administering treatment. They have done their bits – by training health workers. So the question is: who will help the Sierra Leone doctors and nurses who have lost over 100 of their colleagues to the virus?
Save The Children are expected to take over the running of the treatment centre at Kerry Town and I assume those centres in Port Loko, Bombali and Moyamba when they are completed later in the year. What we cannot afford now is another hiatus between the completion of these facilities and the availability of health workers. The last thing we must lose today as a people in these very grim times is HOPE.
As I drive back to Freetown yesterday, more sirens blared and more ambulances sped past me. Victims of Ebola being moved about. If the world intensifies its intervention and matches the rhetoric with action – like Britain and Cuba and China among others – those frightening sounds should be ebbing soon. But even the most sanguine of people have stopped short of being categorical as to when we will near normalcy – not even a matter of getting there.
But one thing remains certain: even if the entire health care systems of UK, China, America and Cuba were to be assembled in Sierra Leone to deal with Ebola, they would fail without a change of our behaviour. The treatment centres can only treat or care for those who are sick and in them. The spread will depend on how people behave responsibly and stop infecting others; when they stop touching dead bodies; when contact-tracing is effective and timely.
I can only say WELCOME TO ARGUS as we hope to get more health workers flying in. And the sun will shine again on that hazy grey Wednesday morning and all will be bright and sunny. Then we go back to basics.
© Politico 30/10/14
