Fieldwork in Uganda, Budongo Forest (2011)

Fieldwork in Uganda, Budongo Forest (2011)

Friday 27 February 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.

VĂ©bola, over and out.

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

Tuesday 3 February 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)