A report credited to the BBC and The New York Times has indicated that the dreaded Ebola epidemic has left over 10,000 orphans behind in West Africa, and these are victimized by neighbors out of fear of catching the disease just as the disease victimized their parents to death.
“This disease is unlike any other. Just the shock of people dropping dead from something no one had heard of before, and, the complete stigmatization that children are going through.” said Sheldon Yett, Country representative UNICEF Liberia.
A case in point is that of Marie in Monrovia, who died of Ebola but left behind a 17-year old son, Harris, and 9-year old girl, Mercy. No one would take in the children since their mother died because neighbors fear they may transmit the disease – they are now more or less outcasts within their own neighborhoods.
“They thought I had Ebola, so they were driving me away. I feel ugly,” Mercy said.
Ebola has an incubation period of 21 days, and an infected person will start showing symptoms after three weeks at which point he might start infecting people. So the natural reaction of neighbors is either to extend a hand of mercy and risk contracting the disease too, or simply to ignore the patient and take off.
Considering the fact that simple acts of kindness could cause an individual to be infected, hardly would anyone blame others for not taking the risk. Thomas Eric Duncan, the man that brought Ebola to the United States helped an Ebola victim from a taxi into her house, before boarding a plane the next day to the United States where he managed to infect a few more persons before dying.
The woman he helped back home in Monrovia also died, but not until she had infected Duncan and Marie, Mercy’s mother.
“When Mercy even played among the children, they would say ‘oh don’t play with her before you get the virus.’” Harris said. “They were saying how our mother died from Ebola, their children shouldn’t play with us, we shouldn’t go around them before they encounter the virus from us, I was really feeling bad.”
“My whole thinking now, [if]Ebola catches [Mercy], then let it just catch me too,” he continued. “Me and her should die together. That’s what I was really thinking on, because I didn’t want her to go and for me to be left here.”
Although the Liberian government through the assistance of UNICEF has set up care centers and provided clean beds, food, and support while children of deceased victims are monitored for 21 days, there is still gnawing fear that these children might have contracted the disease.
“You just break down crying,” said Jessie Hanson, a project manager for Playing to Live, one of the care centers. “So it is frightening. It is hard also to look at these kids and know that they could have Ebola.”