Sierra Leone: If They Survive in the Ebola Ward, They Work On (878 hits)
By ADAM NOSSITER and BEN C. SOLOMON
At the government hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, the deputy nurse matron is one of perhaps three women on the original Ebola nursing staff who have neither gotten sick nor fled. ...
Their sacrifices are evident from the statistics alone. At least 129 health workers have died fighting the disease, according to the World Health Organization.
But while many workers have fled, leaving already shaky health systems in shambles, many new recruits have signed up willingly — often for little or no pay, and sometimes giving up their homes, communities and even families in the process.
“If I don’t volunteer, who can do this work?” asked Kandeh Kamara, one of about 20 young men doing one of the dirtiest jobs in the campaign: finding and burying corpses across eastern Sierra Leone.
When the outbreak started months ago, Mr. Kamara, 21, went to the health center in Kailahun and offered to help. When officials there said they could not pay him, he accepted anyway.
“There are no other people to do it, so we decided to do it just to help save our country,” he said of himself and the other young men. They call themselves “the burial boys.”
Doctors Without Borders trained them to wear protective equipment and to safely clear out dead bodies potentially infected with Ebola. They travel across backbreaking dirt roads for up to nine hours a day.
