Johannesburg - Fear of the kind that is gripping Liberia is incredibly difficult to fathom. “It’s like sitting in a small room with the walls slowly caving in,” says 43-year-old Seaiwon-Aaron Dickson, who limits his contact with the outside world to his office in downtown Monrovia before returning to his apartment in the densely populated suburb of Old Road, where his six children have been holed up since the Ebola crisis began to escalate in July.
“I relax a little at night, but then as soon as the chickens begin to crow in the morning and the new day breaks, the fear returns. Because you don’t know if you wake up with a temperature, and maybe that’s the beginning of the virus. Or if this will be the day when you come into contact with someone who has it and they pass it on to you. Or if the children will get it.”
His wife, Flinhway, is a medical doctor at the well-known government-run Redemption hospital, where she treats victims of the killer disease each day of the week from about 8.30am through to 10pm or so.
“And when she comes home, I don’t touch her. We don’t kiss. We no longer sleep together. She doesn’t hug the children,” the youngest of which is two, so fearful are they both that the virus might have seeped into her skin throughout the day, unbeknown to either of them.
Not working is no longer an option for the 38-year-old doctor, as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s government has issued stark reminders to all medical personnel that not only do they have a professional and moral obligation to assist in curbing the Ebola outbreak, the worst since the haemorrhagic fever was diagnosed in 1976, but if they don’t, their salaries will be stopped and their contracts terminated with immediate effect. In a country heavily challenged by unemployment levels of about 80 percent, there are few who haven’t heeded her words.
As Seaiwon-Aaron spoke to The Sunday Independent by phone on Friday night, Flinhway sat in another room while he watched the TV news in the living room. The update was bleak, and the images of two dying victims to a bed in some of the treatment centres offered little hope.
Of all the west African countries trying to battle the highly contagious virus, Liberia is the worst affected, with the death toll now sitting at more than 2 300 and a further 3 000-plus reported cases.
According to experts, if the transmission rate of the disease can be brought to below one, meaning that if each person carrying it contaminates one other person or no one at all, then the outbreak can be successfully contained. However, if the rate increases to 2.5, then it is regarded as being out of control.
The present rate in Liberia is somewhere between 1.75 and 2.5.
“Ebola is three months ahead of us now,” says Seaiwon-Aaron. “At best, they might be able to bring it under control in the first half of next year.”
An outbreak was first reported in the Foya district of Lofa County in the north of the country in March, and from there spread into neighbouring Sierra Leone.
Though it had been brought under control in Foya, it soon spread back into a different part of the country from Sierra Leone, and since then has been tearing the country apart.
The schools closed for scheduled holidays in April and were due to re-open in July, but are now closed indefinitely. The Dicksons live in an upper-storey apartment in a complex occupied by other families with children of similar ages, but they no longer mingle and now remain indoors as temperatures sit at around 28ºC in the hot and humid rainy season.
“You just can’t trust anyone anymore. You don’t know who they have been in contact with. They don’t trust you either. We are no longer just afraid of one another. We are terrorised. It’s something very difficult to explain,” he says.
Seaiwon-Aaron is fortunate in that he doesn’t have to take public transport, where people travel “shoulder to shoulder in crowded busses and taxis”. Since the outbreak, he has been sharing a car with a colleague to work, and although there are a number of colleagues who want to travel with them, they have had to refuse – the risks are simply too great.
He doesn’t eat in public restaurants any more. He doesn’t mingle. He no longer accepts visitors into his home.
Throughout the day, he and everyone else are forced to disinfect before entering a public building or when they return to their homes, by washing their hands in basins of chlorine bleach – a trusted ally in the fight against Ebola.
“But you then touch other parts of your body. Anthony’s (his white expatriate colleague) hair turned blonde initially, and now it’s green. My hair is still black, but it has started thinning. And you wonder what damage all this bleach is doing, not to your hair, but to your skin. I have no doubt that before long Liberia will be reporting huge rates of skin cancer.”
“I’m a Christian, and I have to continue to believe and to have faith. But I go to church and I don’t trust the person sitting next to me on the bench, and that’s a horrible feeling.
“We believe in miraculous cures, by having someone with healing hands place their palms on us, but that’s dangerous now.
“The Muslim communities are particularly affected, because in their faith they must wash the body as soon as the person dies, but because of that, many more Muslims have died.
“Our traditional practices form the basis of our faiths, but they are now spreading the virus.”
With the outlook so bleak, thousands of Liberians have begun to leave the country in search of nearby safe havens for their families.
However, air travel in and out of the country has been drastically reduced, and there are now only two flights into Monrovia each day, operated by Brussels Airlines and Royal Air Morocco, both of which are offering indirect flights to Accra, in Ghana, the preferred destination for Liberians and, for now at least, a place that is relatively free of Ebola.
“Before the crisis hit, a return ticket to Accra used to cost $350 (R3 889),” Seaiwon-Aaron explains. “Now it’s $1 150 for a one-way flight,” a price that is well and truly out of reach of the average Liberian.
The 22-hour bus trip poses a serious risk of infection for travellers.
So what now?
“I don’t know. All is can say is you can keep in touch with me, and we will hopefully talk again.”
Sunday Independent