These children play mostly barefoot in a house just next to an Ebola hit compound at Rogbangba
By Umaru Fofana
She wailed. Her head tie gave way. But she repositioned it. She jumped. Flapped her waistline. Wiped her tears, as she was goaded away. She looked back. Wailed. Wiped more tears that icicled down her cheek. She looked back again. Wiped her face, again. And so on until she could no longer see the parked minivan.
In that minivan lay the remains of her 11-day-old baby boy at Rogbangba, just outside Freetown. He was being taken away by the Red Cross burial team. Not sure what the true cause of death was. Suspicion: Ebola. The swab team collected some sample for later testing to ascertain just that.
Again no one was sure what might have killed the boy as his mother looked not obviously sick. But Rogbangba is a community that has had its own bout with Ebola. Just a couple of houses away a 15-year-old boy looked sick. His name is Alusine Bangura. A surveillance team arrived to profile him before an ambulance would come to take him to a triage where his blood sample will be taken and tested for Ebola. This was on Wednesday. As I write this piece on Thursday, the village headman just called me to say he had still not been taken to a holding centre let alone a treatment one.
A few houses further up, a teenager had died. The home was quarantined but only in name as the people moved about as if nothing was amiss.
As the corpse of the 11-day-old baby was being driven away, his mother peeped through the window. He was gone. Gone forever. She wailed from inside what was a house in all but name. Around it are shacks in which people live. Sanitation is almost nonexistent. Clean water is a luxury. Even if that boy had not died of Ebola, poverty definitely contributed to his death. It could have been a cold. It could have been come complication at birth. It could have been malnutrition.
I agree that rich people too can get infected with Ebola. But apart from health workers – it is in the nature of their job - poor people it is that get hit the hardest. Otherwise I dare say it becomes a chance infection. At the impressive Ebola Command and Control Centre at the British Council in Freetown, there is an innovative map of the Western Area on the board. Pushpins are creatively used to illustrate where the calls come in from. It is mostly from poor areas – mainly in the eastern axis and slums in the west.
It is they who struggle to eke out a living more than anyone else does. It is they who cannot afford clean water to wash their hands as they should to ward off the virus. Or even soap. It is they who queue up to use latrines that are an incubator of disease. It is they who cannot afford the means to take their sick relatives to a hospital. What are gloves? They do not know them, let alone to be able to afford them. So that when there is a delayed response to pick up their sick people it is difficult for them to transport them safely. It is they who are uneducated, and the leaders care about them only when elections are around. Because they are uneducated, tribalism is the opium they are always given by their literate political tribesmen. I use “literate” and not “educated” there for a reason. Educated people do not bask in mono-ethnic politics.
All of this makes the fight against Ebola pretty arduous – and perhaps odious. Another is the unavailability of treatment centres. The line is now blurred – perhaps lost - between what is or what is not an Ebola treatment centre. I believe it depends on what goes on inside the facility. A five-bed facility like the Lakka centre run by the Italian charity, Emergency, safely qualifies to be called a treatment centre. The Port Loko Red Cross facility now converted by the ministry of health does not, despite having around 100 beds. Unless, of course, as promised the US charity Partners In Health intervenes and provides badly needed health care to patients locked in there.
The unavailability of health workers in these facilities is undoing the whole notion of fighting Ebola. The last time I checked the Kenema Ebola Treatment Centre had only two clinicians without a single Sierra Leonean doctor. I am not sure the WHO ones who were based there administered treatment or went inside the wards. Sierra Leonean Nurses have had to brave it – sometimes with the ultimate price – to keep patients alive. How brave! How heroic!
The last time I checked hopes were pinned on the fact that because a devastating rebel war had destroyed our nation our leaders would learn and not do those things that had led to it. Those who have lived for 20 years and over know we have slid back to those days of injustice, corruption, ethnic politics, et al. When cholera broke out two years ago, or so, the feeling was that things as basic as water and sanitation – otherwise called clean drinking water and toilets – would be made available as a matter of priority to forestall any future cholera outbreak or any such related to sanitation or the lack of it.
When boulders rolled down and killed people, when the rains people need to be able to get clean water in their homes pour down, they die due to mudslide. The real way to address Ebola, which is now endemic here and is bound to be recurring sporadically even after the current outbreak, is to priortise education. That’s the only way to unshackle the people and let them ask questions to their leaders and let them stop living in such appalling condition. That way, we can deal with Ebola from its roots and not from its branches, after it has engulfed us – especially the poor and hapless. Something which is bound to affect even the rich as, in the words of Joseph Hills, if you do not share your riches with the poor, they will share their poverty with you. If we heed that warning, we would save another 11-day-old child from dying and another mother from wailing.
© Politico 21/11/14
