For residents of Iowa City, Ebola isn’t a lived experience. We don’t view it through the lens of hospitals overcrowded with the dead, dying and distressed, or faceless public workers in hazmat suits dragging black body bags out of our neighbor’s home, or border crossings shut down, manned by soldiers with loaded automatic weapons. With 5,000 miles between us and the nearest outbreak zone, we only see Ebola through cable news headlines and paranoia-riddled rants from relatives at birthday parties, but for one family, the effects of the outbreak are much more tangible.
Mohammed Sow was born in 1969 in Kabala, a town of about 40,000 in the northern part of Sierra Leone, but spent most of his life in Bo, the country’s second-largest city. In 2000, he fled the slaughter of the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991-2002) and was granted asylum in the United States. After stints in New York and Atlanta, at the suggestion of a friend, he trekked west to Iowa City where he found a better life: a decent job as a custodian at the University of Iowa and good schools for his three children.
This past March, Mohammed accompanied by his wife, Fatmata, and their children (Muna, Fatima and Adama, aged four, three and one and a half respectively) flew from Chicago to visit family back in Bo. Wanting their children to get to know their extended family, Mohammed and Fatmata decided to leave their children in Bo with their grandmother, Mohammed’s mother, as they headed back to the States.
Unfortunately, events that had begun 160 miles to the east, in a small village in the Nzérékoré region of Guinea, would make this decision a costly one.
In December 2013, two-year-old Guinean boy Émile Ouamouno of the village Meliandou died as a result of Ebola. His sister, mother and grandmother soon also succumbed to the disease, and from there it has ravaged its way across West Africa. By late August of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN’s public health arm, declared the Ebola outbreak “an international emergency,” reporting 3,707 cases and 1,808 deaths across Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Liberia quarantined certain sections of the country’s capital, Monrovia, and closed the country’s border. Côte d’Ivorie followed suit, cordoning off its borders with Guinea and Liberia.
It was into this environment — a situation that Doctors Without Borders president Joanne Liu compared to “wartime” — that Mohammed and Fatmata returned to pick up their children on Aug. 27.
Unable to enter Sierra Leone directly due to the absence of airlines willing to land in the country, they were forced to fly into Guinea and make their way into to Bo from there. Getting back, however, would prove to be even more difficult.
“Flight after flight was being cancelled,” Mohammed said. “I would keep having to email the cancellation forms to my supervisors to show them why I was gone from work for so long.”
For all intents and purposes, Mohammed and his family were stranded.
Despite pleas from the WHO to airline companies to not cut flights to Ebola-affected areas, carriers such as British Airways, Gambia Air, Kenya Airways, Air Côte d’Ivorie, Arik Air and Asky Airlines suspended operations either partially or completely in countries such as Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Additionally, one of the few airlines that didn’t curb flights into the region, Air France, was embroiled in a pilot’s strike for most of September.
Eventually, on Sept. 25, Mohammed and his family were able to catch a flight out of Conakry, the capital of Guinea, back to Chicago O’Hare.
The strife caused by the Ebola outbreak, however, followed Mohammed upon his return to the United States.
“At O’Hare, a guy from the TSA checked me out to make sure I didn’t have any [Ebola] symptoms,” Mohammed said. “And ever since I’ve gotten back to work, the University has been measuring my temperature to make sure I’m still healthy. I’m doing it all voluntarily, and it’s all in the CDC guidelines for people who’ve just gotten back from West Africa.”
Other developments upon Mohammed’s return have been more troubling. “People who know I just got back from Sierra Leone won’t shake my hand, or even look at me sometimes. The people who do will ask me these really insulting questions like, ‘Do you know how to not get Ebola?’, ‘Were you close to anyone who had [the disease]’ and ‘How is Ebola spread?’” As if being from West Africa has endowed him as an Ebola expert.
What’s disturbed Mohammed the most, however, is what he describes as the “overblown” reaction of the Western media, and really the West in general.
“It’s completely overblown. More people have died of cholera than Ebola, but no one’s said anything about that. And it’s really hurting the economy in Sierra Leone and these other countries. The plane I took back home was an airbus meant to hold 300-plus people. There were only 60 people on it. The airport and city center [in Conakry] were complete ghost towns. It’s just all overblown and sad.”
According to the WHO, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people die each year from cholera, dwarfing the number killed in the latest Ebola epidemic, which is currently hovering around 5,000. In Liberia, Sierra Leone and guinea combined, 7,300 succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 2007 according to UN statistics, and the Washington Post reports that 1.5 million children die each year of diarrhea. And yet, Mohammed laments, these events remain largely absent from a media landscape saturated with Ebola coverage.
Broader issues aside, Mohammed is simply content to be back at home with his family.
“Again, it’s sad but, you know, at least I’m home now.”
