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

[uppityperson]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/world/africa/ebolas-cultural-casualty-hugs-in-hands-on-liberia.html

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.
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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.”

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Liberia — from the elite doyennes who spend their days sending houseboys to the market to fetch oranges for them, all the way to the young boys on Tubman Boulevard who run up to cars hawking plastic bags of ice — used to be a tactile place. Everybody kissed friends, strangers and cousins, regardless of whether people met every day or had not seen one another in 20 years.

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Those close family ties expose the fragility of the belief that you can completely protect yourself from Ebola by keeping your hands to yourself. Can you really not touch an ailing mother?.....Just after his mother’s funeral, Mr. Dunbar’s own forehead got hot with fever. For 15 days, he stayed at John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia, fighting the disease. It was a fight he eventually won. But when he got out of the hospital, he found out that four of his sisters, his brother, his father, his aunt, his uncle and his two nephews had died. His entire family, wiped out in days.......

[Marrah_G]

1. It's very hard to imagine

Hopefully things will start to turn around now that the world governments are starting to wake up.

[Barack_America]

2. The images and thoughts of the suffering children is too much to bear.

And makes me so grateful to have my children vaccinated against everything I can.