To all of you who dont contribute anything positive to the fight against #ebola: Read Ellas (from MSF) article pasted below. Read and bow down your head in shame. Indeed, where is the outrage? Where is the empathy? Where is your support? I question you all, who sit by and do nothing. I dare you and accuse you, I am outraged over #ebola, I am outraged over your selfishness, I am outraged over the arrogant attitude. Just sit down, make bad comments and pull others initiatives down. If you think that that is the way you should behave, Tewas blood is on your hands. You too can prevent this, and you should. And yes, I have the bold mind to say this. If the shoe fits, wear it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2014/09/04 Ella Watson-Stryker (USA) is currently working as Health Promoter in MSFs emergency intervention in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. She tells the story of a young girl, one of many victims of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The first time I saw Tewa* was in the triage tent. She had come to MSFs Ebola hospital with her mother, baby sister, and several other extended family members. She sat hunched over in a plastic chair, her legs too short to reach the ground. I gave everyone a snack while they waited and she smiled shyly at me. We admitted her because she had a fever and her father had died from Ebola. Happily, her blood test came back negative for the virus and she came out, showered and smiling and treated for malaria. I breathed a sigh of relief and we chatted a bit in the counseling area as she proudly practiced her school-girl English. I sent her home with her aunt and baby sister. Her mother tested positive but recovered quickly and followed them a few days later. I saw Tewa back in her village when I brought two of her family members home – survivors of Ebola. She smiled at me and went back to playing with the other children. A week later however, my heart dropped when I saw the patient register. There was her name, and in red letters the word READMITTED. I spent the day hoping she would be negative again, haunting the medical board until the lab results were posted. This time Tewa wasnt so lucky – the symbol (+) was written after her patient ID number. Now it would be a fight for survival. I watched the small magnet on the medical board that symbolizes Tewa, trying not to ask the medical staff too many questions. Her young aunt was also in the isolation ward and over the fence I asked her about Tewa each day, trying to be hopeful but not too optimistic. Most of our patients will die, I reminded myself, trying to maintain a self-protective emotional distance. I took Tewas aunt home cured – one of the rare happy days— and saw her mother. I looked for Tewas face among the sea of excited children even though I knew she wasnt there. How is she? her mother asked me. Yesterday she was able to shower, I told her. But the next day when I asked about Tewa, the doctor in charge of her care shook his head. Its not good. She started bleeding, he told me, and she has that look. I knew the look. Ive seen it too many times over the past five months. Ok, I said, biting my lip and willing my eyes to not fill with tears. Im sorry, he told me. Were all sorry. Were sorry that we dont have a medicine proven safe and effective to kill the Ebola virus. Were sorry that we dont have a vaccine. Were sorry that weve failed to stop the epidemic. We know we should be doing more but we dont have the resources, we dont have the capacity, we dont have the staff. Some days it feels like it doesnt matter how hard we work because there arent enough of us. Were fighting a forest fire with spray bottles. Local health workers try to care for Ebola patients without the proper training or equipment and become sick themselves, infecting their own families before dying. This is how Ebola started in Tewas family. Children leave the hospital negative for Ebola but go back to houses contaminated with Ebola virus and there is no one to disinfect them. Media attention is constant but much of the focus is on whether the virus will kill Europeans or Americans. Journalists come to film staff in exotic yellow hazmat suits, to photograph tanned, exhausted expatriate aid workers, and then they go home and tell the story of the poor Africans and the brave foreigners who came to save them. They are in love with the romance of the dirt roads and killer virus, but miss the outrage and helplessness we are living every day. We see entire villages wiped out, we follow the tangled webs of extended families as one by one they become sick and die. We live in a world where conversations revolve around where to put all the bodies that no one has come to bury. We separate sick parents from healthy children or the reverse. We listen to the brokenhearted wails of a woman who has lost the last of her ten children, and then a week later we see her in our triage tent with her small grandson and we watch them die. No one is asking where the rest of the response is. They dont question why, after five months of talk, and more than 1,500 known deaths, the epidemic is still raging. They dont ask where is the money donors are pledging, where are the boots on the ground? Children like Tewa arent rare… today I saw another young girl in triage for the second time. Tomorrow I will look for her name in the patient register and I will hope that when the lab results come back, she will be negative and I can take her home once more. But even if she goes home, she will go to a village where everyone is dying. She will go to a house that has not been disinfected. She will go home, but she will not be safe. *Name changed
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 10:15:29 +0000
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