MHSC
Senior Moderator
The following is a guest post featuring field notes from Liberia’s Ebola outbreak by Leah Breen. Breen is a senior at Colby College majoring in Global Studies and Government.
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Liberians have begun to greet each other with “foot-shakes” instead of handshakes.
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At Monrovia’s only Western-style coffee shop, a U.N. staff member observes, “Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s decision to close the borders was just to appease the international community. It barely means anything to close the border between Guinea and Liberia or Sierra Leone and Liberia. One can easily cross through the bush.”
In late July, the government announced a new travel policy at Roberts International Airport: required fever testing for all passengers. There was just one issue, as a traveler points out in an e-mail, “The thermometer read 32 degrees Celsius (87 degrees Fahrenheit) for every person…When the issue was pointed out by a traveling public health worker, [the screener] responded by stating that the thermometer was supposed to read lower than normal.” When I boarded a flight three days later, it was no surprise that my temperature read the same: 87 degrees. The government may appear to outsiders to be implementing effective preventive measures to hold the virus in check, but their containment strategies are dubious and the impacts are potentially harmful.
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He argues, “There’s no such thing as Ebola. The government ordered doctors to inject sick people with a disease that makes them very weak, and then the doctors remove the patients’ kidneys to sell for the government. Why do you think the hospital never returns the bodies to the families and buries them wrapped in plastic? So that no one will see that the body’s kidneys had been removed.”
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According to the World Food Program, 64 percent of Liberians live in poverty. Infrastructure is poor—buildings in Monrovia that were looted during the war remain abandoned. Only 14 percent of Liberians attend secondary school. Liberians have good reason to believe that their government is not doing enough to increase quality of life in the country.
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In order for a government to manage a health crisis, citizens must believe that their government will work to protect to them. Citizens must be able to trust that the government is acting in their best interest. Liberia’s 14-year war, its widespread corruption, its questionable legitimacy, and limited presence outside the capital has hindered the development of citizens’ trust. When citizens do not view their government as accountable, they are not likely to trust the government in return. Perhaps that is why mobs of angry citizens have chased health workers, why an Ebola victim’s relative burned down the second floor of the Ministry of Health, and why citizens create roadblocks to prevent ambulances from collecting the bodies of Ebola victims. Only when citizen-government trust and accountability is embedded into the political culture will Liberia’s government and its people be able to work together to properly fight this Invisible Rebel – and future crises.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...8/29/fighting-ebola-liberias-invisible-rebel/
Snip
Liberians have begun to greet each other with “foot-shakes” instead of handshakes.
snip
At Monrovia’s only Western-style coffee shop, a U.N. staff member observes, “Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s decision to close the borders was just to appease the international community. It barely means anything to close the border between Guinea and Liberia or Sierra Leone and Liberia. One can easily cross through the bush.”
In late July, the government announced a new travel policy at Roberts International Airport: required fever testing for all passengers. There was just one issue, as a traveler points out in an e-mail, “The thermometer read 32 degrees Celsius (87 degrees Fahrenheit) for every person…When the issue was pointed out by a traveling public health worker, [the screener] responded by stating that the thermometer was supposed to read lower than normal.” When I boarded a flight three days later, it was no surprise that my temperature read the same: 87 degrees. The government may appear to outsiders to be implementing effective preventive measures to hold the virus in check, but their containment strategies are dubious and the impacts are potentially harmful.
snip
He argues, “There’s no such thing as Ebola. The government ordered doctors to inject sick people with a disease that makes them very weak, and then the doctors remove the patients’ kidneys to sell for the government. Why do you think the hospital never returns the bodies to the families and buries them wrapped in plastic? So that no one will see that the body’s kidneys had been removed.”
snip
According to the World Food Program, 64 percent of Liberians live in poverty. Infrastructure is poor—buildings in Monrovia that were looted during the war remain abandoned. Only 14 percent of Liberians attend secondary school. Liberians have good reason to believe that their government is not doing enough to increase quality of life in the country.
snip
In order for a government to manage a health crisis, citizens must believe that their government will work to protect to them. Citizens must be able to trust that the government is acting in their best interest. Liberia’s 14-year war, its widespread corruption, its questionable legitimacy, and limited presence outside the capital has hindered the development of citizens’ trust. When citizens do not view their government as accountable, they are not likely to trust the government in return. Perhaps that is why mobs of angry citizens have chased health workers, why an Ebola victim’s relative burned down the second floor of the Ministry of Health, and why citizens create roadblocks to prevent ambulances from collecting the bodies of Ebola victims. Only when citizen-government trust and accountability is embedded into the political culture will Liberia’s government and its people be able to work together to properly fight this Invisible Rebel – and future crises.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...8/29/fighting-ebola-liberias-invisible-rebel/
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