By Umaru Fofana
There once lived an unhappy young girl whose mother had died. Her father married a widow who had had two daughters with another man. The stepmom hated her guts. And the story goes on and on and on, with the horror Cinderella had to endure, albeit with a very happy ending. Yes a very happy ending.
That is what I wish for many of the children I have met in the last four months of my research and eventual filming of a documentary to screen on Channel 4 and HBO later this year, on the impact the Ebola outbreak on children in Sierra Leone. UNICEF says around 9,000 children here have lost either or both parents to the disease. Many of them got infected and recovered. Theirs is a world that is torn apart – some of them more so than Cinderella’s.
I have met some of these children. In many cases the state doesn’t know they exist. At Maxwell Street in Freetown we were filming one day. A team of young men came from the ministry of children’s affairs to find out whether any Ebola orphans lived there. Abu and his younger sister had long lost both their parents to the virus. The fact that the state is only finding out now – gropingly – means the kids can be missed out on or the figures can be bloated in a country where anyone with a book and a pen asking about orphans is expected to have the whole world cash in hand. Or even both. Why not! The people are poor and destitute – with no hope in many instances.
At nearby Jalloh Terrance in a shack-like make-believe house, Rhoda and her two children sit virtually on the ground outside. They look, they are, and they probably will always be poor and hapless. Unless the state, charged with the responsibility to care for them, rises up to its basic responsibility. Schools have just reopened a few days ago. Rhoda cannot send her kids to school. Her son was infected after his father and grandfather and the landlord and his wife and many others had all died of Ebola. The seven-year-old had all his clothes burned as part of the Ebola protocol. They included his uniforms. Now Rhoda cannot afford to buy uniforms for him or his elder sister to return to school. Never mind their lunch money.
Inside an interim care centre at Lungi in northern Sierra Leone sits a 4-year-old boy. When I first met Ibrahim Sankoh last year in a general ward at the Port Loko Government Hospital, he was in effect awaiting death. He had lost his parents and all siblings to Ebola. He had got infected himself but recovered.
Not long after his recovery the little boy Sankoh lost his sight as a direct result of the infection. The hospital said he needed to be flown abroad for there was nothing they could do for him. Following the intervention of Politico newspaper he was taken into a Don Bosco care centre and paper work is now complete to fly him to Germany for a sight-saving life-saving surgery.
Just outside Kenema town is a young teenage girl whom I would rather keep anonymous. After Ebola had claimed the life of her father, she took to commercial sex work if only to help look after the family. A few months later, she became pregnant.
She and her mother and other siblings and cousins had to go to the nearby quarry to break rocks for a living. The alternative to doing that, they said, was starving to death. No one cared about them – not their extended relatives, not the state. A children’s agency, Street Child, can only do as much for them. My British cameraman/director and I managed to raise some money between us to give to the family to set up a business. The last time I heard from them business was flourishing, they said, and one of them wept on the phone in appreciation for what we had done for them. Let us hope it becomes life-changing.
In Moyamba Junction in southern Sierra Leone is 15-year old Mariama Blango. In September last year her father – a well respected chemist – died under unclear circumstances. A swab test on the body of Jonas Blango showed he did not die of Ebola, clearing the way for his widow and other family members to wash it. They would get infected with the deadly Ebola virus, setting the tone for a major tragedy to hit the family. 16 of them tested positive for the virus. 11 of them died, including three of Mariama’s siblings.
I have reported on the Ebola outbreak across the country – including in John Thorpe, Devil Hole and many other communities in the outskirts of Freetown, and I have met many Ebola orphans. Just last week I was in Barmoi in Kambia district. Two children – 2 and 5 years – had no idea what surrounded or perhaps even awaited them. Their mother had died of Ebola a week earlier, and their father had just been taken away after showing signs of the disease. He would die a day after I had left the boys. Such is how God works miracles that the last time I heard the kids were asymptomatic. Let us hope they survive unscathed – it could be like killing a dead man. Even with both parents alive and around them life was hard, let alone…
Across Sierra Leone today heart-wrenching stories of tragedies of Ebola orphans are easy to come by. What is not easy to come by is help for them. Theirs is a mix of ostracism, neglect and poverty. Flashes of two children I saw standing inside a derelict house around John Thorpe – after parents had been snatched by Ebola – keep hounding me. Admittedly I did not return to the house to find out whether or not they survived.
In Makeni I met a Baby Warra as she’s fondly called. She lost her parents to Ebola at the MSF treatment centre in Kailahun. She is now under the care of her uncle and his wife who are doing all they can to help her. But they have their own children to look after. And their income is meagre.
During our filming Baby Warra’s elder brother, not older than 5 years, took a pencil and a paper and drew something. When asked what it was, he said it was his mother lying dead. He drew another and said that was his father’s corpse. And then another which he said was him standing forlorn inside the treatment centre after losing both parents.
The drawings might not have looked exactly like corpses but the fact that he could come up with that months after losing his parents to Ebola, tells you how that child needs help – including psychological assistance. He is not getting it.
As we tried to digest that traumatic tremor, a young man walked in with a pile of papers. He was crosschecking the names of Ebola orphans they had on their database. Surely NGOs are taking this very serious issue more seriously than the government seems to. Right from the most basic – data.
At the end of Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s the country inherited a lost generation of orphans and child combatants. This accounts for the high numbers of uneducated and unemployed young men and women who now pose a threat to its stability. When Ebola is finally defeated, the country will again be confronted with children with a blighted future, just because they have been orphaned by the virus. How these children are looked after will define the future direction of our nation whose leaders are bickering while the next generation degenerates.
“She spins and she sways to whatever song plays. Without a care in the world” goes the lyrics to the Steven Curtis Chapman song titled Cinderella. Here our own Ebola orphans cannot spin or sway, and very few sing for them. How I wish everyone did. How I wish they spun and swayed in their seesaw. But they can only do so on fallen tree branches. The consequences of that are clear for all to see. How I wish they were all Cinderellas.
© Politico 29/04/15
