Ebola diary: delivering food and supplies to quarantined homes
|
Version 0 of 1. Day six Sarah Sesay cannot leave the little terrace of rough shacks with corrugated roofs where she lives on the side of a hill of rubble and rocks. There is a police guard by the last house to make sure she does not. Two of her neighbours have left in body bags. Another has just been taken away by ambulance. She and the 25 others who live in this cluster of homes are now in quarantine for 21 days. This is in fact extended quarantine. Sesay, 45, her three-year-old granddaughter and the other families living here were already confined to their row of nine shacks because of the deaths. As I arrived, men in yellow biohazard suits, spraying chlorine on the foliage and rough track where the sick man had passed, were just disappearing over the brow of the hill – an alien presence among the trees and plants. So now the clock starts ticking again. This is Smart Lane, New England Ville, although those who live here don’t exactly have all the comforts the address implies. They share two toilets and a bathroom of sorts. The road is in a shantytown on a hill overlooking a Coca Cola bottling plant in western Freetown, which has one of the highest rates of new Ebola cases in Sierra Leone. Sesay thinks they will not become ill. All the sick came from one house on the street, which now stands empty. The two who died were a brother and the sister who returned to the family home to nurse him. Their mother is in an Ebola treatment centre. The man on his way to an isolation centre was their father. “All his other children abandoned him,” says Sesay. “He was locked in the house all night. He was yelling for water, day and night. Nobody came to help.” His neighbours were too afraid of the virus to go near. He had five remaining adult children, they told each other – it is their responsibility to help him. And in the end, they phoned one of them, who returned and called the ambulance. But it arrived full of other people and the staff took one look at the rubble and the slope and decided they could not pick him up. Now, two days later, he has finally gone. “We feel safe because in my own home nobody has complained of an illness or symptoms – but we don’t go near that particular house,” says Sesay. She says quarantine is not a good thing, but since the government has imposed it they have no option but to abide by it. Plan International has just made it easier. The NGO, funded by the UK Department for International Development, is delivering packages of food and essential supplies to quarantined homes – with great care. The procedure is that families are told by the local quarantine officer that there will be a delivery; the package is then deposited outside the house for them to take inside – except that the lorry can get nowhere near this street. Neighbours are asked to volunteer to carry the parcels up the hill on their heads. Large plastic sacks contain black-eyed beans, smoked fish, rice, onions, teabags, sugar, cocoa powder, palm oil, drinks, margarine and powdered milk. There is also water in plastic sachets, charcoal, detergent, sanitary towels and hand sanitiser. The supplies should last for around 10 days. Without the drop, people will slip out of their homes after dark and go searching for food. There are quarantined zones that leak badly. Some villages have been in quarantine for months because Ebola cases keep occurring, such as Bet Bana Marank, where an outbreak was triggered by the death of a highly respected member of the community. Everybody wanted to help wash and dress the corpse as a mark of respect. The second to die was the woman who nursed her, another much loved figure. “That was why that village had up to 106 dead and 35 people still in quarantine,” says Morie Amadu, project manager at Plan International. There is only one man in Smart Lane. I wonder to myself if the others have disappeared in the night and gone to stay with friends or family, where they can lead a normal life and try to earn a living. Emanuel Kamara came home to bathe and change his clothes two weeks ago and found he could not leave again, he tells me. There has been a considerable cost. “I lost my job because I could not go back to work,” he says. It was advocacy work, sensitising the community to the dangers of Ebola. His employer told him to return his ID card. He had to call a friend to come and get it. “I regret it right now,” he says. “On the other hand I think it is good to check my status.” He pulls a hand sanitiser out of his pocket and squirts it into his palm. He says he does not fear Ebola. “I have always prayed to God to guide me.” He is only 21. People are not supposed to touch each other. I ask him about girls. “I don’t have time for girls,” he says, with something that is almost a laugh. As we make our way back down the hill, a man calls out to me. He wants me to pass on a message. “Tell the Queen she is taking a long time to visit Sierra Leone. We want to see her,” he says. All photographs by Sarah Boseley |