Word of the year 2015: “Seriously?”

Leave the new year’s resolutions for what they are, you won’t be able to lose that weight, the handsome man you would fall for on Tinder won’t have that much hair as he shows on his picture, you won’t find the job of your dreams and after one week of intense jogging you will find your couch much more interesting than the training program you downloaded on your smartphone. 

Much nicer is to reflect a bit on the good things that have happened in the past year!

Personal 2015 moments to remember

Family

Brother: “So you donated a 100 dollars to the Virunga National Park and send us a post card that that was our Christmas gift for this year? Where did I deserve a sister like that! But it’s ok, the gorillas need it more”.

Job

Boss : “Veerle, tu as tutoyé le Ministre!”

Love

Y: “I don’t care if I need to come to Ethiopia to see you.  I’ll be there in 2 days, might need to bribe someone to get the visa sorted out though”

Friends

The Ladies: “Even after months of not seeing you, it seems like it was last week. Give me a hug you Ebola-fighter!”

The Boys: “Who are you again? Doesn’t matter, let’s have some beers and an excessive amount of rosé and discuss life, love and world problems.”

Honest Mistake

Veerle: “did they really choose ‘I wanna be your dog’ by The Stooges as their weddings’ first dance? That is so cool!” 

Family: "No V, it's ‘I wanna be adored' by the Stone Roses!"

V: "Oh ok, ...still very cool!"

Seriously!

Daily life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, 2008)

Smengel

Back in Kinshasa after 5 weeks of cholera intervention, and wondering …

What will I wear for my sister’s wedding?

Do the new born babies of my best friends look like the fathers, because its nature’s way of telling them it really is their offspring?

Why can’t I ask him to go for a beer and a rock concert anymore?

Why did the parents of my Congolese colleague gave him the name ‘Bienfait’? And more, why not?

How is my friend doing after the hospital in Kunduz was bombed?

All of a sudden I get scared that my friends and family will forget about me. That they will remember me as ‘that crazy girl who worked with primates, spent some time in the forest and then decided to chase epidemics in Africa’ but we lost track of her somewhere between ebola and cholera. 

My Norwegian friend invented a word for this feeling, and it’s the weirdest (but very beautiful) word I heard in years: “Smengel” (to be pronounced with Scandinavian accent). It’s the feeling of not being missed anymore. To feel annoyed not to find the words to express what situation you are in and to feel even more annoyed when nobody understands you.

One day I would love to write a book, not because I think my story is more interesting than anyone else’s, but I am scared that I (and others) will forget everything that is happening and has happened. Being alone in the forest of Cameroon I read a book about an anthropologist and his work in the same area. Everything sounded familiar, and I felt like someone understood. I was not imagining things! Absurd situations, difficult to explain, and to believe can become daily business before you know it.

Entre loup et chien?

Checking water sources during the Cholera outbreak, Kindu, RDC. (Sept, 2015)

Ali Baba and the 7 "enquêteurs"

Piles of burning plastic in the middle of the road, you get stuck in the mud every 3 steps and a strong smell burns your nostril hairs on the way to the ‘centre de santé’. Bikenge is not really the most charming village in Eastern Congo. Young men come here to look for gold but find themselves lonely and far away from home. Daily life is dominated by promiscuity, prostitution, sexual transmittable diseases, excessive alcohol and drug abuse. When I think about it, it sounds a bit like 3 days of Tomorrowland, but with nice weather!

I put together a team of 8 motivated researchers to cross the whole ‘Zone de Santé’ to do a survey on health indicators in the area. It was meant to be as one of the candidates presented himself: “Je m’appelle Ali Baba et je serai ton chef des enquêteurs”. Hired!

Inaccessible roads guided us to the most isolated villages where you find amazingly friendly people but living in difficult circumstances. Households up to 20 people living under the same roof, having no access to health care, women are obliged to deliver at home putting themselves and their babies at risk. Family planning? Non non, il faut mettre au monde! When it is survival of the fittest this is the way life goes.

Congo is a fascinating place. Not only I had the honour to meet Ali Baba, but I can add Khadaffi, Beoncé, Bob Marley, Julius César, Nicolas Sarkozy and the twins César 1 en César 2 (as they were born with a caesarian section) to that list. 

 

Mother with child, village Riseri, Maniema Province, DRC (July 2015)

Hands Free

Besides running, or rather, dragging myself up to the 8th floor to go back to my room (this altitude is killing me!) we didn't get much excercice during the 2 weeks course in Addis. Elevators are tricky, can't risk to be in a box like that when there is a powercut, which is quite often, hence my claustrophobia is resulting in an increased red blood cell count. 

Every night after classes we have been storming into a cosy local bar for a cold Ethiopian beer, right next to the hotel where we were staying (Bole area). We only needed some good old P-Square songs to get us dancing the daily research questions away: 'Personally' and 'Chop My Money' always works! It didn't matter that everyone was watching and laughing at our crazy moves, because it resulted in free shots (at least for the women) from the barman and a lesson in Ethiopian shoulder dislocation movements.

I think I was getting the hang of it, because when I now pass by the bar the guards are always smiling, showing some brown, but happy teeth. Yesterday he even stopped me and wanted to shake my hand. All of a sudden I froze and didn't know how to react. This kind man with twinkling eyes wanted to shake my hand, probably to congratulate me on my great dance moves, and the first thing I thought was: 'no, don't touch me, ebola is real!'

But I pulled myself together, took his both hands in mine and stood there for a good 2 minutes, enjoying the normal human friendly contact and smiling back, white and happy teeth. 

*thx Django

Addis Ababa, March 2015

Operational in Ethiopia

origin of mankind
origin of the Rastafari
never been colonized (although the man remind me of Italians)
intriguing traditional dances
different types of beer
delicious food
wonderful coffee
beautiful women (and men)
familiar churches

and

a crazy team with researchers originally from: Ethiopia, Italy, Belgium, Rwanda, Guinea, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Kenya, India, Bolivia.

Trying to finding the energy again to write scientifically about Ebola, but often drifting off to what has happened the last months and what is still happening in West-Africa.

All operational in Ethiopia.

Holy Trinity Church, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (March 2015)

Temperature is rising

I like Belgium for its diverse population, wandering around in Antwerp reveals a glimpse of what the rest of the world might look like. At the same time the intolerance towards this diversity is increasing. I thought it was a joke until I actually saw the military standing guard in the Jewish quarter in Antwerp!

Imagine the surreal feeling I had during a meeting with Liberian ministers about quarantine measures taken for families of confirmed ebola patients. They started comparing with the military presence in Belgium, so how could we be against coercive measures taken in Liberia? High time to come out of my ebola bubble and see what is happening in the rest of the world!

The 2 months in Liberia were interesting, there was hope the last chains of transmission could be stopped and the outbreak could finally be declared as over. Unfortunately this was not the case and until the day I left the country there was still a lot of work to be done. So many children lost their parents, so many parents lost their children, the economical and social consequences of this outbreak only start to reveal now.

But I am back home, packing again to continue to Ethiopia next week. First making a stop in a western corner of Belgium, enjoying voluntary isolation, peace, quiet, silence and red wine (yes, I am a village girl!). 

The temperature monitoring sheet has some blanks here and there, it seems these months of working in ebola context are slowly fading.

Vébola, over and out.

Elwa 3, MSF Ebola Treatment Centre, Monrovia, Liberia (January, 2015)

2015 Wishlist

A new year, a new mission, no big plans besides eradicating ebola...starting in Liberia.

It is a strange situation in Monrovia. I don't want to say it is the end of the outbreak yet, but numbers are numbers and they say that we have 1 patient in the treatment centre as we speak. I can't even imagine what the centre must have looked like when I go back in the data and see that there were weeks with more than 150 admissions in one week!

I was a bit worried to come here because when I was struggling in Sierra Leone good friends told me the stories they lived through some weeks ago of refusing patients at the gate, the 200 bed treatment centre was not big enough and dead body management was more necessary than anything else. I can't express the respect I have for them, attending to the patients as good as possible and trying not to get infected themselves. Definitely worth to be the people of the year 2014!

When they come back here, they will see a different Monrovia and Elwa: number of beds is down to 30 and dismantling and desludging (worth googling) has started!

Besides running around from meetings to the clinic and back again, changing from regular clothes to the strangest scrubs and boots, it is not bad to end the day with a beer and some crazy attempt to play beach volleyball with the ebola team! FYI, gloves can be the perfect excuse to touch another human being without breaking any rules...

500th Survivor at Elwa 3, Monrovia, Liberia (Jan 2015)