By Umaru Fofana
“Hello!” A little girl screams on the other end of the phone. Her voice is panic-stricken. She stutters and stammers and struggles to utter what she has telephoned to say. Finally she manages to let it out.
“Me mama don die” – my mother is dead – she says. As you try to ask her about details – address and circumstances etc – so you can send help there, she is not done yet and goes on: “Me big broad sef dae fet fet na gron” – my elder brother is also struggling on the floor. Apparently dying. She continues: “Me papa be don die en we don dae na koronti for ten days now” – my dad had died and we have been placed in quarantine for 10 days.
This is one of varied and several heart-wrenching experiences workers at the toll-free emergency Ebola service line – 117 – go through on a minute-by-minute basis, day-in day-out. If you are the helper that innocent distraught little girl has called, the way you react to her will prove as crucial as the way you respond to her request for help. She is bewildered – not sure what is happening around her. She needs to be picked up from that hellhole she now finds herself in. But those on the 117 end of the line can only do as much.
But before that, the centre itself is a far cry from what it was in the early days of the Ebola outbreak. Classic state-of-the art set-up it now has. A well laid-out room with various compartments receiving calls, responding to calls and following up on earlier calls.
Mostly young volunteers – university students and fresh graduates – they can run any response centre in the world, I bet. That is if the other side of the bargain – namely those who should physically go there and provide help – are up to the task and have the logistics. I will return to that in a moment.
Often callers get frustrated and vent their spleen on those on the 117 end of the phone. In the one hour that I spent at the Ebola Call Centre in Freetown recently, I lost count of how many people called and rained invectives on those who picked up their calls – sometimes even insulted their parents. Such is their calm demeanour that one of the attendants looked unperturbed even at the venom being spewed out against her. “I understand their frustration even if no need to insult me, so I have learned to cope with it. That’s what we were trained to do here – to be calm”.
Another said to me: “They insult us but we do not feel insulted”. He’s probably right, otherwise his job is compromised. But clearly that’s a lot to stomach. “I will cuss back and hang up” I thought to myself. But these are no ordinary phone calls. These are phone calls to save a life, although many call to just make fun and distract. I would imagine that is an offence punishable under the country’s emergency regulations. The good thing around that is that all calls are automatically recorded. I suppose to keep the workers in check but also to trace sinister calls. I am surprised that none of those hoax callers have been brought to book or their lines blocked at the very least.
You can understand why they behave the way they do. They undergo psychosocial training and counselling. All the workers I spoke to at the centre on that day said they drew their strength of philosophy from one fact. “Distress callers are not called that for nothing” one said. “They are in distress” she went on with an angelically calm demeanour. “We therefore have to put up with them”.
You have to admire these young lads who go through a lot of trauma just receiving calls from often traumatised people and listening to their distraught voices.
Often people blame 117ers without a distinction. I understand why that is – they are the ones we know about, the ones we have access to albeit from a distance and the ones we can vent out our anger on. Callers cannot call the ambulance dispatch to pick up the sick or the burial teams to bury the dead. So the spleen is reserved for the 117ers. They who do not own or run the ambulances to pick up the sick. They who do not own or control the burial or swab teams that go to collect dead bodies. They who do not even command the surveillance teams. They only escalate the calls to the appropriate authorities to act. The truth is, these authorities do not always respond as should.
The question persists as to why Ebola keeps spreading in Sierra Leone as the figures get grimmer. The latest from the WHO says 397 new infections were recorded in the week ending 7 December, three times the figures for Guinea and Liberia combined. This comes in the wake of high numbers especially in and around the capital Freetown, and in the north of the country. However, a release from the WHO in Sierra Leone in the last hour says the situation is worsening in the diamondiferous Kono district in the east.
A joint team of officials from the United Nations, Sierra Leone government and the United States Centre for Disease Control arrived in the area and discovered that in 11 days, 87 bodies were buried including health workers.
The country’s director of disease prevention and control, Dr Amara Jambai is quoted by the WHO as saying that "we are only seeing the ears of the hippo" – in other words the tip of the iceberg, and it has spread out in eight of the 15 chiefdoms.
Now all of this is happening in a district that does not have a single proper holding centre let alone a treatment centre. This is the district where the death of a small boy around April – or so – was said to have been attributed to Ebola – even before the first case was confirmed in a laboratory. There was no follow up. It has only one ambulance for Ebola response, according to the head of the district Ebola response team and Paramount Chief, Paul Saquee. There is no proper holding centre in the district let alone a treatment centre.
Now assume someone in Kono calls 117 to report about a sick or a dead person in their midst as they should. What are they supposed to do? They will be as effective as reporting to the appropriate authorities. But with only one ambulance in the whole district do you blame that on the 117ers or on the broader administration who failed to provide such basic things?
It is heartening to know that the culture of emergency service is being engrained. There is now a 112 toll-free line being set up in the same building where the 117 is housed. This will be used by and for the police and the fire force. I hope those running that will be as effective as those I saw running 117. And that the response from the safety and security forces will be more effective than the current Ebola ambulance response. So that when that old lady calls to say fire is approaching her room, the fire force will be prompt; and when the Fourah Bay College lecturer calls the police to say armed robbers are breaking into his apartment, armed personnel will be there to rescue him.
© Politico 11/12/14
