Ebola?s Cultural Casualty: Hugs in Hands-On Liberia

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Ebola?s Cultural Casualty: Hugs in Hands-On Liberia

By HELENE COOPEROCT. 4, 2014

MONROVIA, Liberia ? It is hard enough to push away family and friends, shunning an embrace or even a shake of the hand to protect yourself from Ebola.

But imagine trying not to touch your 2-year-old daughter when she is feverish, vomiting blood and in pain.

Precious Diggs, a 33-year-old contractor for a rubber company, had heard all the warnings from the legions of public health workers here in Liberia.

She had seen the signs that dot the road from Harbel, where she works, to the capital, Monrovia, some 35 miles away: ?Ebola is Here and Real!? they say. ?Stop the Denial!?

But when her toddler, Rebecca, started ?toileting and vomiting,? there was no way her mother was not going to pick her up.

?Na mind, baby,? Ms. Diggs whispered in her baby?s ear. ?I beg you, na mind.?

Here in the heart of the worst Ebola outbreak in history, the question of whether to touch a stranger has only one answer: You don?t. But even in more intimate circles, in families and among lifelong friends, Liberians are starting to pull away from one another, straining against generations of a culture in which closeness is expressed through physical contact.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/w...l-casualty-hugs-in-hands-on-liberia.html?_r=0

 

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Re: Ebola?s Cultural Casualty: Hugs in Hands-On Liberia

Ebola Continues Its Baleful Advance In Liberia

October 05, 2014 7:57 AM ET</TIME>
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SHAPIRO: We've heard a lot about the efforts to physically isolate people who may have caught Ebola. There's also a lot of stigma around the disease. And I wonder what you can tell us about what patients and health workers are doing to address the social isolation factor.

BEAUBIEN: This is probably one of the hardest things about this disease, is that it's spread by touch and that people are afraid of one another. You know, even out on the street, you know, as we were driving back to the hotel, you could see that the people waiting for the buses had all separated a full arm's-length apart from each other. And that's just never seen in Africa. You know, I was hearing today from some people about nurses who would get completely suited up and about to go into these isolation wards, and they would hug each other 'cause it's the only time that they are actually allowed to do that. And also heard from another health care worker today about this sort of awful scene on one of the ward that's for suspected cases. And there was a mother there. And her young baby had just died from Ebola. And she just started wailing and screaming. And every one just moved away from her. So in this moment of great grief where people would normally move toward someone to comfort them, everyone on the ward just started moving away from this mother wailing over the death of her child.
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http://www.npr.org/2014/10/05/353849484/ebola-continues-its-baleful-advance-in-liberia