15 Nurses Losses Life to Ebola

The best defense against despair was to keep working. Many times, that choice was far from obvious: Josephine Finda Sellu lost 15 of her nurses to Ebola in rapid succession and thought about quitting herself.

She did not. Ms. Sellu, the deputy nurse matron, is a rare survivor who never stopped toiling at the government hospital here, Sierra Leone’s biggest death trap for the virus during the dark months of June and July. 

Hers is a select club, consisting of perhaps three women on the original Ebola nursing staff who did not become infected, who watched their colleagues die, and who are still carrying on.

“There is a need for me to be around,” said Ms. Sellu, 42, who oversees the Ebola nurses. “I am a senior. All the junior nurses look up to me.” If she left, she said, “the whole thing would collapse.”

In Sierra Leone, a group of young men take on the dirtiest work of the Ebola outbreak: finding and burying the dead.

Video Credit By Ben C. Solomon on Publish Date August 23, 2014.

In the campaign against the Ebola virus, which is sweeping across parts of West Africa in an epidemic worse than all previous outbreaks of the disease combined, the front line is stitched together by people like Ms. Sellu: doctors and nurses who give their lives to treat patients who will probably die; janitors who clean up lethal pools of vomit and waste so that beleaguered health centers can stay open; drivers who venture into villages overcome by illness to retrieve patients; body handlers charged with the dangerous task of keeping highly infectious corpses from sickening others.

Their sacrifices are evident from the statistics alone. At least 129 health workers have died fighting the disease, according to the World Health Organization. 

But while many workers have fled, leaving already shaky health systems in shambles, many new recruits have signed up willingly often for little or no pay, and sometimes giving up their homes, communities and even families in the process.

“If I don’t volunteer, who can do this work?” asked Kandeh Kamara, one of about 20 young men doing one of the dirtiest jobs in the campaign: finding and burying corpses across eastern Sierra Leone.

When the outbreak started months ago, Mr. Kamara, 21, went to the health center in Kailahun and offered to help. When officials there said they could not pay him, he accepted anyway.

“There are no other people to do it, so we decided to do it just to help save our country,” he said of himself and the other young men. They call themselves “the burial boys.”

Doctors Without Borders trained them to wear protective equipment and to safely clear out dead bodies potentially infected with Ebola. They travel across backbreaking dirt roads for up to nine hours a day.

 

Ms. Sellu, who is one of the only Ebola workers at the Kenema hospital who have neither contracted the virus nor fled. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

In doing their jobs, the burial boys have become pariahs. Many have been cast out of their communities because of fear that they will bring the virus home with them. Some families refuse to let them return.

After Mr. Kamara started working, his family said, he was no longer welcome in his village. His uncle, the family patriarch, told him never to come back. At first, he stayed with a friend, but the man’s wife was afraid and kicked him out, too. 

With no pay for months, he sometimes begged on the street after work to get enough money for food. 

Recently, he talked the owner of a small shop into clearing out enough space in a back room for him to sleep there.

He is finally getting paid, about $6 a day, and he hopes to find a room to rent, probably at an inflated price. Some of the other burial boys have tried to rent apartments but have been refused.

“If I have a long life, I can go back to my people,” Mr. Kamara said. “I can talk to them: ‘I’m doing this job for you.’ Maybe they can understand me.”

At the government hospital a few hours away in Kenema, photographs of the dead nurses are still plastered on the crumbling walls. 

Notes to young women suddenly cut down, like Elizabeth Lengie Koroma — “Lengie We All Love U But God Loves U” — offer visual reminders of the pain that remains.

“Today three, tomorrow four — it was just like that, rapid,” Ms. Sellu recalled, her cheery demeanor quickly dropping. “We said, ‘What is happening?’ ”

 

Tributes to nurses at the hospital who have died. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

She added, “You are asking, ‘Who is next?’ ” In all, some 22 workers at the hospital died.

The nurses and doctors here had banked on their experience treating Lassa fever, another deadly disease that causes bleeding. 

But Ebola is of a different order, and they had never seen it before.

With the first cases, the nurses simply used their Lassa goggles. Ebola demands a far more protective face shield. They also used “light gloves,” Ms. Sellu said. 

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