After a long captive journey by air, bus, boat, and car I arrived early this AM to Freetown, Sierra Leone.  Along the way I ran into a former resident I used to work with from Santa Rosa, CA named Cathryn Christensen while waiting for my flight in Brussels.  She was headed back to Burundi where she currently works.  Random international crossing of paths always me make take pause, as if somehow the intersection holds deeper meaning if I just analyzed it correctly.  Or not.

The Ebola presence was immediately announced at the airport when we had to wash our hands in chlorinated water on the tarmac.  Then our foreheads were scanned for fever.  A group of Norwegian humanitarians clad in light brown dungarees with green back packs, topped with berets, huddled just in front of me as I looked for my Visa waiver, yellow fever card and other documents I would need to get into Sierra Leone.  In the customs area there were relief workers from Ireland, France, Italy, and Canada in varying degrees of uniform dress.  All converging in Freetown for one cause.  Infectious core particles. Virions.

Then it was onto a boat to take me into town to a place called the Family Kingdom Resort where I would crash for the night.  Security guards at the gate carried thermal scanners instead of guns in their holsters and captured my temperature by pointing one at my forehead before I could enter. " 36 degrees celsius- proceed sir," the boyish guard told me.  Then more hand-washing with chlorinated water from a big gatorade style cooler before I could enter the office.  People are reluctant to even share pens.  Schools have been closed here since the epidemic began.  Stores, shops and all transit only run from 9-5 in order to be monitored with Ebola checkpoints.  There are signs and billboards everywhere: "Ebola starts with me!", "Ebola survivors are heroes!", and African pictographs of characters vomiting, shaking with fever, or having diarrhea urging people to know the symptoms.   I asked the driver, Augustine, what "NHS" meant on a lot of signage.  "No hand shakes".  Ebola may not be airborne but is has suffocated this country.

Before driving 2 hours north of Freetown to Lunsar where I will be working, I had coffee with a Pakistani logistician, met with a Croatian quality control manager, and talked international football with a group of Sierra Leonean drivers, all of whom hold advanced degrees but cannot find work in their fields.  Community. Global community.

As I write here from Lunsar after visiting the Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU), the African sun burns down defiantly through an ashen haze of humidity smoked in exhaust and the plumes of prescribed burns rising from the distance.  There is an ancient ceremony here I begin to recognize again, a marriage between new, exotic attention and the skeletal bride of neglect, waiting at the altar yet again.
Evening songs, like butterflies, rise up from behind the thatched roof dining hall, just in time to cut through the last fading blood orange clouds.  I take it all in. And stamp it onto the first page of my missalette.

My room in Freetown

View from IMC headquarters

Ebola Treatment Unit Lunsar