July of 2014, it was just another day, as any other normal day would be, normal by the ‘not-really-normal’ standards that had set into the routine life of anyone and everyone, during the Ebola times.
A mother and child came to this remote rural hospital. The mother was sick and she was carrying her baby, an infant, in a swaddle. It was a fairly run down facility, rather poor in infrastructure but yet the best available, nearest for this family. The Kenema Hospital was a local, government health center.
This was somewhere deep inside rural Sierra Leone, in West Africa, a country that had still not recovered from over a decade long civil war between 1991 and 2002, with large visible traces of its impact clearly standing out in every aspect of human life, including the health care services and infrastructure. A war that had consumed over 50,000 lives. Ebola was by now already threatening to be worse, or perhaps it was already, given the devastation caused by the virus in less than six months, with already 700 victims.
The mother presented with complaints that were suggestive of Ebola and she was admitted to a holding center. Holding center is a facility where, a suspected case is kept while waiting for laboratory testing to confirm or rule out Ebola. When the results came positive, she was moved to the Ebola treatment unit, which is a facility where confirmed positive Ebola patients are kept, managed and cared for.
The infant, appeared well, yet the recommended precautionary procedures required that the baby be not touched until tested negative. Blood sample from the infant was collected and sent for laboratory testing.
May to November is the rainy season in Sierra Leone, during which at times the rainfall could be torrential. This was July and interestingly in August, next month, there will be a period called the ‘seven day rainfall’, when it rains incessantly for seven days straight without interruption. This year this rainfall would be symbolic of how many tears the Gods above would be shedding.
Eventually the mother and her medical staff, both lost their battles to the Ebola virus. The mother died, leaving behind the infant, an orphan. Seeing and experiencing the magnitude of sickness and deaths, the staff remained comforted because by then the baby’s test results had come.
The baby had tested negative. That afternoon, despite seeing the child orphaned, there was still something to cheer about in the ward.
Because the baby was in contact with the mother all this time and was being breast-fed, and the mother had died to Ebola, the protocol required that the baby be watched closely. Therefore, the staff (largely nurses) decided to keep the baby in the hospital. Since the baby had tested negative and the ward had confirmed (tested positive) cases on the beds, they decided to keep the baby close to them, in the nursing station area. It would have also been easier to keep a close watch on. The space was limited and all that was available there was an old used card-board box. The nurses nicely swaddled the child and placed in that cardboard box, the best basket available there. ‘Basket’, not the kind they call as ‘Moses Basket’ but indeed, so very symbolic.
During the times of Ebola it was a very difficult decision to make, between holding or hugging and caring for an orphan child versus following the recommended infection control measures strictly and letting the baby lie in a box and wait and watch with hope, expectations and prayers. How could anyone see a sick looking baby and not love and comfort. One had to just do what is right, just what you and I would have done in any other normal life situation. Except, that the times of Ebola were not really normal life situation. The times called for, not to touch your one-year-old child when she is having fever, vomiting or bleeding and is in pain and one doesn’t know yet if she has Ebola or not. What would you do?
For the nurses in Kenema general hospital, for the human inside them, the woman inside them and for the mother inside them, it was not a very difficult decision to make, and a decision they made without any hesitation. They couldn’t just watch the baby lying in the box alone, especially having been orphaned recently. They, every one of them, would therefore, pick up the baby from time to time, cuddle the child and hug and care just like they would do to their own child.
Also during these times when death, chaos, pain and loss was sweeping across families, neighborhoods, communities and the countries, normal people including the nurses like above, found solace, great comfort and joy in gently lifting the baby from the box and hugging and cuddling, during their busy work hours and also at the end of their tiring work shifts, when they wanted to relax. The baby stood as a symbol of hope and comfort, not just for the baby herself but for all around her.
And since the baby had tested negative, there was comfort, there was assurance and there was joy.
What followed in the next four weeks will remain heart-rending… and shakes the very foundation of humanity that believes in loving, caring and sharing, in compassion and, in faith.
Twelve of the nurses contracted Ebola, and only one survived. The baby had died a few days back.
What actually happened…?
Just a few days before, the baby had started to become ill
Panic swept through the staff.
Samples from the baby were sent for testing.
There were fearful gasps as the word spread that…
“The baby tested positive for Ebola”.
One after the other, the staff who did nothing wrong, had just cared for an orphan, cuddled an infant, started showing signs of Ebola, as they all became ill. Their only ‘epidemiologic-link’, call it a ‘mistake’, call it a ‘responsibility’, the ‘call of duty’, was taking care for this baby. I would call it the truer than true ‘human touch’.
In the following weeks, at least twelve nurses connected to the baby-in-the-box, became victim to the Ebola virus. Was it from the “baby in the box”? May be, may be not. We will never know.
Eleven of them died.
I was not there, so this story may be inaccurate in some details or may appear to be a bit twisted, but it is a fact, it is true that something like this happened and that the nurses at Kenema hospital in Sierra Leone took care of an orphan baby in a card-board box as there was no place, after the mother had died to Ebola, and that the baby had died and, that almost all the nurses working in that ward, in that nursing station, had died.
Why did the nurses die? Did they commit a mistake? Did they make any wrong choices in life? Choosing to spread human love over, self? People had to really struggle and hold themselves back from hugging anyone, even someone who had just lost all of his/her family members or someone, a mother who was crying for all of her five children who were buried in unmarked graves, possibly in a mass grave, because they died before anyone could get their names and there wasn’t enough space in the burial ground.
Looking back, the details and accuracies seem not relevant or unimportant. The fact, told as a story, of the “baby in the box” is now, a legend. A telling legend of humanity, and also sadly a stark and tragic reminder of how normal and spontaneous humane and human expressions and forms of love, caring, affection, and hugging were forbidden in times of Ebola. The simple yet powerful expressions of human brotherhood, that are the very fabric and foundational strength of humanity, of every human society, turned to be deadly. Ebola was annihilating humanity by annihilating humans. Someone rightly wrote, “The Ebola virus preys on care and love, piggybacking on the deepest, most distinctively human virtues.”
One spur-of-the-moment uncalculated deed of kindness and act of humanity would spread the virus and spread the disease. The wicked virus during the West African outbreak had a pervasiveness that gave it a perverse ability to twist humanity into a painful liability.
Yet, the “Baby in the Box”, is remembered as a tale that reflected unconditional human love during times of fear and devastation. Of fearless faith in fellow humans, a faith, that is the substance of things we each hope for, the evidence of miracles that we cannot see but surely believe in.