Editor’s Note: This week, The College Voice received this portion of an email correspondence between Mimi Bangali ’13 and Associate Director of CISLA, Mary Devins. After graduation, Bengali returned to her home in Sierra Leone. This letter describes conditions in the rural areas of the country, where access to healthcare and accurate information regarding the virus is sparse. We publish this letter in the hopes of humanizing the virus, and as a vote of support for Bengali. We hope to continue printing updates from her as we receive more information about how the College community can help.
If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that the country [Sierra Leone] just finished a three-day lock down. Everyone stayed home for three days, and about 21,000 volunteers were tasked with visiting every home in the country to give them the correct information on Ebola, distribute soap, demonstrate hand washing – you know, basic stuff like that. The UN and other development partners were tasked with monitoring this exercise.
It was quite an experience.
No sooner than I had recovered from my second round of malaria, I was deployed to Moyamba, a district in the south of the country. I learned a lot more about my country in those three days than I had my whole life. I was born and raised in the city, and before this job had never set foot in a rural village in Sierra Leone. Now I found myself in the middle of the bush for three days with no internet access and no cell phone signal. I was meeting people that had never seen a city in their lives, had never had running water or electricity, didn’t use money but lived daily off their farms or still engaged in the barter system. Some of these villages were so far into the bush that they were inaccessible by vehicle; we’d drive as far as we could go, then get out and walk the rest of the way, sometimes crossing a river or two. I was meeting people that didn’t speak the national dialect, just their own tribal tongue. The children called me “pumui,” which means white man; probably because my complexion is a shade or two lighter than the average Sierra Leonean. Or perhaps it was because I looked a little nerdy peering at them through my glasses as I hopped out of an NGO vehicle.
Either way, it was like I was on a completely different planet. I saw first hand how crippling illiteracy can be to a nation. While my colleagues in the city were lambasting the government about the uselessness of the exercise, calling it a total waste of resources, I was appreciating the need. We went to some villages where they couldn’t tell us the first thing about Ebola; they couldn’t even pronounce the name, much less tell us about modes of transmission or methods of prevention. Other villages with confirmed cases were convinced it was witchcraft. I spoke to a quarantined family that was quite livid at being locked up, insisting vehemently that their brother had been “shot with a witch’s gun.” Another family lost two children within 12 hours. They too insisted that it was witchcraft.
We went to some villages that were completely empty. One entire village had fled into the bush to hide because they knew we were coming. They had been told that we were going to point a gun at them (this was the infrared thermometers). Even in the city, a lot of people had never seen an IR thermometer before. The government has set up checkpoints all around the country; when you get to one you get your temperature checked by these thermometers that are pointed at you. There have been cases of people being so terrified as they approached these checkpoints they suffered a nervous break down, because of rumors that something was going to be pointed at you, and that the thing gave you Ebola. Rumors of this mysterious object had filtered back to the villages, and many people did not want to be around when it arrived. There were even rumors that the government has conspired with Western organizations like WHO to have a certain number of people die before the disease is brought under control, and no one wanted to be part of this ill-fated quota.
These malicious rumors are doing a lot of damage. Many people refused to take the soap being distributed, because they had been told that it causes Ebola. We went to many households and saw the bar of soap sitting untouched where the volunteers had placed it, the residents eyeing it suspiciously. There were reports of people burying the soap, dropping it into latrines and even boiling it to rid it of Ebola. Some people say these rumors were started by the opposition to undermine the efforts of the government. The whole thing is being politicized. The opposition is having a field day pointing out every blunder and misstep the government makes; everyone knows how this epidemic is handled is going to be one of the major factors in the next election, and people are getting distracted by that.
While rumors of contaminated soap and Ebola-causing temperature guns abound among the less educated, an even greater number of conspiracy theories are making the rounds among the educated. I am yet to meet a single person who doesn’t believe one theory or another. A lot of people think this whole thing was an experiment using us as lab rats; why else will the cure only work for white people? Or that this is part of a bigger ploy to reduce the population of Africans; biological terrorism. People keep saying we’ve been eating bush meat for generations, and never had Ebola. Why now? Why was a cure suddenly available as soon as the first white person got it? Why did the availability of the cure coincide with the outbreak of the disease. People are saying someone started this outbreak to test whatever cure they had come up with.
It’s physically, emotionally and psychologically draining to be in this country right now. Nowhere is safe. Living under a constant threat is tiring. There is a definite gloom that has settled over the country. There is the conspicuous absence of school children playing in the streets; there is no more music blaring from speakers in the streets, as was the norm. There is no outlet for people’s frustrations. Everyone is scared, myself included. I am glad I am contributing towards the fight, but sometimes I just wish I could leave for a while. My friends have all left the country and my family has decided to send my brother away, since he doesn’t have a job locking him in.
I am heading back to Moyamba in a few days to train more contact tracers there, since they just had a sudden exponential increase in the number of cases.
On the plus side, some friends of mine have started an Ebola challenge to raise funds for MSF, since they seem to be the most effective organization in this fight. I hope Connecticut College can take up the challenge. We definitely need as much help as we can get. •
