Sierra Leone is a country that is close to my heart. Before the current and devastating Ebola outbreak, it was not a country many people could point to on a map.
Except for people from the aid community perhaps; they might tell you of the war, the poverty, but also the beautiful beaches, the seafood, the wonderful people who will ask you “How de body?” as a greeting.
Krio, spoken widely in the capital Freetown, is a language close to English.
The Ebola outbreak has focused unprecedented attention on Sierra Leone and neighbouring Guinea and Liberia. It is a classic nightmare scenario, played out in countries still far away.
Nevertheless there is an acute awareness that this nightmare could arrive on our doorstep, so around the world there is screening of travellers who arrive from Africa, protective suits at the ready in airports and hospitals worldwide.
Questions are asked in western countries: could our health system cope with an outbreak? Despite so many controversies about the Irish health system, ours is nothing like the health sector in Sierra Leone. Even before the Ebola outbreak the average Sierra Leonean did not expect to live beyond 50.
On average, one out of every five children dies before their fifth birthday and it remains the most likely place in the world for a woman to die in childbirth. There are not enough doctors, nurses, or trained midwives.
The people of Sierra Leone and neighbouring countries are now stuck in isolation, not only in the many isolation wards where people who may have been exposed to the virus wait for three weeks to see if they are ill, but also in a much larger isolation: flights have been suspended, cargo ships bringing vital supplies no longer dock.
Isolation
In addition to that, there is the isolation that we subject Sierra Leoneans to in our minds, because we don’t understand exactly what is happening. This hinders compassion, it makes the illness and the horrors it has created too far removed for us to really care.
A close friend recently told me she had heard that “all this Ebola was due to the burial practices out there”. I realised that she was repeating what she had heard on the news. These burial practices, not further defined, all of a sudden seemed sinister and backward.
Irish burial
One of my favourite short stories is Colum McCann’s
A Word in Edgewise
. It portrays a traditional Irish burial practice. In the story, a woman does the hair and make-up of her best friend, reminiscing about their past together.
The narrator, it turns out, is preparing her friend for her funeral. It so beautifully shows the compassion and respect Irish people show for the deceased.
Whereas in many other western countries, dealing with death has long been transferred to firms of undertakers, so that the deceased’s loved ones can simply turn up for the funeral, the Irish bereaved often remain stubbornly hands-on.
In many ways the Irish burial practices are not so different from those in Sierra Leone. In this impoverished country death is part of life and, until the Ebola outbreak occurred, it was normal that the family prepared their dead for burial.
Nothing strange, nothing primitive, simply a chance to say goodbye and give somebody a dignified resting place. In a country where death comes to many in what should still be the prime of their life, or at the beginning of life, death is an integral part of people’s everyday existence.
Sierra Leoneans continue to contract Ebola because they are still not being assisted to give their loved ones safe but dignified burials. As this aspect of dealing with the crisis is slowly gaining recognition, the least we can do for Sierra Leoneans is to report on their plight correctly.
The Irish Government and Irish charities are doing their best to respond to the needs of the people of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Donate if you can, but if you cannot, or choose not to, please give these people the respect they deserve by thinking of them as ordinary people, who are, in fact, quite like the Irish in their desire to treat their dead with dignity. Pieternella Pieterse is a PhD student at the University of Limerick where she studies Accountability and the primary healthcare system in Sierra Leone. Further information at www.ebola-anthropology.net