It is the day after Christmas in Northern California and the lights are still strung up on houses and in trees.  They look different in the way that things do when they represent something in the past.  Children on our street are embarking on their maiden voyages on a range of new scooters, bicycles and skateboards.  Through my window I can see Mount Tamalpais clearly tonight.  It wears a warm, new green coat thanks to recent heavy rains.  My name is Andy Desruisseau and I am leaving tomorrow to travel to Sierra Leone to work in an Ebola treatment unit.  

The government of Sierra Leone last week banned any large church or familial gatherings during the Christmas season.  The core elements of African culture, family and gathered faith, became the latest victim of this the 25th Ebola epidemic.

This is the first time I have even considered writing a blog.  The crisis seems to warrant it.  I don't intend to make this a medical blog, beholden to data, protocols or science.  That being said, I think the name of the blog deserves some attention.  

Virion,  an entire virus particle, is made up of a outer protein shell (capsid) and  an inner core of nucleic acid (either RNA or DNA but in the case of Ebola RNA). The core confers infectivity, and the capsid provides specificity to the virus.   The core can be infectious in a positive, hopeful way in the figurative sense.  International communities answering the call and bringing what Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet,  has termed "mighty kindness", drew me in.  If not me, then who?

"Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness."

Which leads to the second term in the blog, "missalette", a periodic prayerbook containing hymns or prayers for the season. Despair, which in latin translates into loss of hope, is met in the villages of the world with morning songs of faith, strength, and community.  To me virionmissalette made sense.  Amplified mighty kindness.

Tonight I pack up to leave in the AM for Freetown, Sierra Leone with International Medical Corps.  I arrive Sunday night to find out at which Ebola Treatment Unit I will be working for the next six weeks. A brief time but something.  While I was packing my backpack my children brought some of their stuffed animals up to send to children infected in Sierra Leone camps.  Curious George.  A pig with gigantic pink feet.  Crayons.  Kaleidoscopes. 

Whatever I bring into the Ebola Treatment Unit stays in the unit.  I hope it is enough...