Hands

Sierra Leone has been portrayed in the media in a number of ways in the last several years.  I have listened to the music of Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars but have never seen the documentary.  Similarly, I never saw "Blood Diamonds," a film starring Leonardo Dicaprio, which documents the alluvial diamond trade in Sierra Leone.  Both attempt to given an account of Sierra Leone's brutal and         complicated civil war which lasted from 1991-2002.  I have started reading the book "Blood Diamonds" recently but do not purport to have a handle on all the billigerents that played a role in this bloody reign of terror that is estimated to have killed between 50-300,000 and displaced 2.5 million during its 11 year span.

Suffice it to say, at the center of the uprising that involved multiple coup d'etats and several groups vying for power, was the control over the country's diamond mines which are located in the Southern and Eastern regions of the country.  Many children (from both Sierra Leone and its troubled neighbor, Liberia) were recruited into the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and were reportedly drugged and coerced to participate in atrocities against their fellow countrymen.  Child soldiers.  The book "Blood Diamonds" starts off  with Sierra Leone's president, amidst continual confirmed reports of mass atrocities being perpetrated against civilians, asking the people of Sierra Leone to all "join hands in peace." He woke up the next morning at his presidential palace to find that dozens of severed hands were dumped on his doorstep. Campaigns such as "Operation Pay Yourself" and "Operation No Living Thing" were carried out by a collection of  desperate youth, soldiers, and civilians who enlisted into the RUF.  The country had reached a boiling point after years of corrupt diamond smuggling, unfulfilled government promises to improve the quality of life of the ordinary citizen, and the young, impressionable, displaced youth from neighboring Liberia who were recruited to fight with the RUF in return for medical care and money.

The civil war ended only a little over 12 years ago.  The village I am currently staying in, Lansur, was completely decimated by the fighting.  Schools, churches, and gas stations were looted and burned to the ground.  A whole new group emerged from the barbarous conflict- amputees.  They are visible here.  Handless.  Legless.  A constant reminder of how this country suffered the unimaginable for over one decade, hiding in fear from an enemy supported by corrupt diamond trafficking, hiding from an enemy who looked just like them.

The stoicism I have witnessed in the Ebola ward has roots perhaps in the culture, in general, as well as this recent callous atrocity.  Trauma has been woven into everyday life here even before the civil war.  Even before Ebola.

Adamsay, a 60 year old woman from a neighboring village, speaks only Krio, a de facto national language that came from the Krios who were descendants of freed slaves sent here from the West Indies, Great Britain, and the United States (mostly Georgia and South Carolina).  It is very similar to Nigerian Pidgin English.  She has been laying on the floor on a mattress in the confirmed ward ever since I started working here.  She has languid eyes, a defiant grimace, and a chiseled jaw ridge that, when all taken in together, give her the countenance of someone who has seen more than you will ever see and acts from within regardless of the situation outside of her.  The civil war and Ebola have taken freely from her.  Aunts, Uncles, cousins, children, grand-children, nieces, and nephews.  All part of her quotidian life in the village one day and then snatched in an instant by an unprovoked enemy, be it a misguided rebel or a virus that started in fruit bats before jumping into humans, hijacking their cellular machinery and driving them quickly towards death.  To call her a fighter or a survivor seems insultingly inadequate.  Maybe you endure and overcome because that is what you have repeatedly done.  We are what we repeatedly do.  We are....what we repeatedly do.

Adamsay has been in our confirmed tent for over two weeks now.  When I look at her hands and feet, they are strong but somehow soft, every articulated bone and tendon warmed over 60 years by the fires she has tended are in beautiful repose, even here, laying on the unblanketed mattress on the floor. She, and only she, will write the ending.  I think she will make it out.

Isaac is 25 years old and works in the WASH department, responsible for chlorinating every inch of our treatment center, day and night.  He is from Freetown and is still trying to finish high school.  He lost his father and his brother in the civil war.  Yesterday, he showed me where I could order an omelette in town and we shared a coke together before he had to board the bus for work.

The more you unravel the history of Sierra Leone, the more people you meet, the more magnified their beauty becomes.  In fact, Ebola isn't the biggest enemy they have encountered.  Nor is it the only invisible assailant they have battled.  But it has the stage now.  We are the stagehands.  The world light is bright here. The props are shiny.  All of the actors are playing themselves, as they will continue to do long after the audience has gone.