Ebola Safari: One Nurse's Experience Inside the Sierra Leone Epidemic
Mertens, Richard
Synopsis "Ebola Safari: One Nurse's Experience Inside the Sierra Leone Epidemic"
"Ebola Safari: One Nurse's Experience Inside the Sierra Leone Epidemic" is an account of the author's experience during the West Africa Ebola virus outbreak in Sierra Leone. As a nurse volunteer, he was part of a contingent of healthcare personnel recruited by a United States medical nongovernmental organization to administer skilled medical care to victims infected with the Ebola virus. As a nurse involved with the response to the Ebola epidemic, he finds he has to negotiate a challenging international bureaucracy while simultaneously reconfiguring his developed world medical training to adapt to challenging Third world conditions in the midst of a novel and puzzling disease epidemic. The nurse's assigned destination is Port Loko, Sierra Leone in December, 2014, the height of the epidemic. There he undergoes a crash course in personal safety, infection control and untested treatment plans regards the Ebola virus and learns to acclimate to the multiple languages of other national contingencies that comprise the staff of the Maforki Ebola Treatment Unit. The story recounts the minimalist infrastructure and materials of the make-shift Maforki ETU and how workers needed to be on constant guard against the Ebola virus. Additional challenges of heat, sanitation, confusing logistics, multiple languages, cultural norms, dogs and tropical diseases that mimic Ebola confront the staff as they attempt to be part of an eclectic team thrown together on short notice. The unifying constant of the book is how patients and staff maintain a singular and shared vision to endure beyond the immediate discomforts and threats to life. Staff cohesion matures and eventually patients admitted to Maforki experience better odds of survival as a result, increasing from 1 in 10 to 8 in 10 thanks to a refined treatment plan created on the fly. Whether the workers speak Krio, Temne, Cuban Spanish or English, the group develops a system of delivery of care that shows heartening results. The nurses, doctors and other workers faced daily obstacles of scarcity, filth, infection risk and both frightened and brave patients. The nurse protagonist meets patients who have promising futures cut short, have miraculous recoveries or have their lives threatened by the act of hospitalization itself. The Kargbo family beats the odds to survive intact juxtaposed to those patients who succumb in a day. Patients who are strangers rally to care for others. One national worker risks his livelihood to lead a challenge for fair working conditions. National nurses, like Dorine and other support staff, jealously guard their highly valuable jobs in an economy ravaged by the epidemic. Other nationals vie for positions on the corpse team or cemetery detail in a country where unemployment runs near 80%. The author is witness to patient struggles while he deals with physical hardship and the mental stress of daily human death interspersed with indignities and triumphs of human decency. His experience teaches him there is a certain value to minimalism in contrast to the many excesses of industrialized countries' medical systems, enlightening him to the view that medical care is an achievable universal right.
