Filing Dispatches from the Valley of Death

Ebola Reporting Nothing Short of Heart-Rending, Courageous

Ebola has certainly grabbed its share of headlines over the last month, though I suspect it was still viewed with detachment by most Americans. That is, until yesterday, when word came of a Liberian man holed up in an isolation ward in a Dallas hospital. Now it's no longer one of those "African" problems, you know the kind that get a short mention in the wire briefs buried in a newspaper.

Fortunately, some media have ignored the xenophobia and have told the Ebola story with compelling renderings that provide the context for why thousands of foreign doctors and soldiers are pouring into Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to treat the afflicted and stop the virus's spread. It gives you some hope. But just as quickly you realize just what it is they are up against. And soon the hope begins to ebb.

That was my feeling after reading today's story from Adam Nossiter in The New York Times from a forlorn (is there any other) district in Sierra Leone, where he visited what the headline aptly calls "A Hospital from Hell."

“Where’s the corpse?” the burial-team worker shouted, kicking open the door of the isolation ward at the government hospital here. The body was right in front of him, a solidly built young man sprawled out on the floor all night, his right hand twisted in an awkward clench.

 

The other patients, normally padlocked inside, were too sick to look up as the body was hauled away. Nurses, some not wearing gloves and others in street clothes, clustered by the door as pools of the patients’ bodily fluids spread to the threshold. A worker kicked another man on the floor to see if he was still alive. The man’s foot moved and the team kept going. It was 1:30 in the afternoon.

In the next ward, a 4-year-old girl lay on the floor in urine, motionless, bleeding from her mouth, her eyes open. A corpse lay in the corner — a young woman, legs akimbo, who had died overnight. A small child stood in a cot watching as the team took the body away, stepping around a little boy lying immobile next to black buckets of vomit. They sprayed the body, and the little girl on the floor, with chlorine as they left.

Read it and weep.

High praise to Nossiter for keeping it together to craft this gripping dispatch. You might say, that's his job. Trust me, this is not what journalists, even the West Africa bureau chief for the Times, signed up for. Not only is he reporting a story of incredibly tragic proportions, he is putting is own safety at risk in the process. The precautions one needs to take before entering a hospital filled with the bodily fluids and excretions of the dead and dying are nothing short of extraordinary.

Also, walking among dead bodies never becomes routine. You simply don't detach and retire to the hotel bar for a dirty martini. I can't help but think Nossiter is thinking about his children and how badly he wants to hug them. This kind of reporting takes its toll. It has to, no matter how good you are. And Nossiter is damn good.

The reportage from him and others, like NPR's Jason Beaubien and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, Robyn Dixon of The Los Angeles Times we are given a light that shines on what Ebola really means. Families laid to waste. New colonies of orphans. The fear and anger that has supplanted despair. Through it all, there is a dedicated cadre of reporters who are there to sort out the truth from the conjecture, providing perspective amid the uncertainty. For that, they have my thanks.