Night Shifts

I worked the night shift last night.  Going into work as everyone is going home feels like you are going against the natural current of things.  Working at night is more spacious and tends to be a bit more mischievous.  It feels like trespassing.  I haven't worked nights in a long time until I arrived here.  The same night work vibe materialized.  Except it remains hot and well lit at the Ebola treatment center.

I have been reading enthusiastically about the drop in the number of new Ebola cases in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone but they don't dilute the individual cases we continue to see.  They also stir a unique set of emotions for our national staff.  Every single Sierra Leonean will tell you that Ebola has been a scourge and has shattered life here on every imaginable level.  But getting a job working for an international relief agency has given them something often unattainable in Sierra Leone- a steady job.  Even those with advanced degrees in engineering or business administration sat unemployed for years after the war, making ends meet with odd jobs here or there for which they were terribly overqualified.  They are now drivers, warehouse managers, and security guards for our American-based non-governmental organization (IMC).  And they get paid reliably and mostly on time.  When Ebola is driven back to the jungle and the international disaster relief agencies start to withdraw from Sierra Leone, they will once again be entering into the pool of overqualified, underemployed folks akin to those who drive cabs in Bangladesh, sell used phones in Dakar, or work as nurses in Freetown in government hospitals that pay little and often sporadically.

Some will have a chance to go back to the work they did before Ebola with the money they have saved working for IMC.  Michael, a driver who takes me in a Toyota van to work regularly, owned a small sporting goods store in town before Ebola shut him down and wonders if and when he may be able to open up again.  He has a mouth that looks like it is always smiling when he talks.  He drives safely but fast and looks at you when he is talking/driving.  "The people here don't have any money.  And when they start to get that money again, I don't think they are going to come buy footballs."  The economy here will bounce back, like a deflated ball here, an inflated ball there, and likely end up where it was after the civil war and before Ebola- leaving its citizens on the bench.  It is no wonder that so many of the brightest, or luckiest, or most connected, when given the chance, choose to leave Sierra Leone for the United States or Europe.

The national staff working in our organization, from Yusef, a talented sketch artist who never finished school because of the war and then Ebola, who works security at the front gate , to Isaac, who lost almost all of the elder men in his family to the war and then 4 of his cousins to Ebola, who works on the WASH team disinfecting the grounds and us, to all of the nurses who leave their children and homes to come work in our treatment center from far away, there is a lot vested in battling Ebola and a lot of uncertainty about what they will do for a living after Ebola.  They endure with grace and humor.  I am filled and affected by their spirit.

"We all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable.  Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.  They provide, ultimately, only torment."  So wrote a philosopher named Josiah Royce in 1908.

I read that quote in a book I am reading called Being Mortal.  

(Now that would have been a good title for the instruction manual they forgot to give us at birth.)