Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, says the proverb,
but rather the hero’s heart.
Maybe this is true in any battle; it is surely true of a war that is waged with bleach and a prayer.
For decades, Ebola haunted rural African villages like some mythic
monster that every few years rose to demand a human sacrifice and then
returned to its cave. It reached the West only in nightmare form, a
Hollywood horror that makes eyes bleed and organs dissolve and doctors
despair because they have no cure.
But 2014 is the year an outbreak turned into an epidemic, powered by
the very progress that has paved roads and raised cities and lifted
millions out of poverty. This time it reached crowded slums in Liberia,
Guinea and Sierra Leone; it traveled to Nigeria and Mali, to Spain,
Germany and the U.S. It struck doctors and nurses in unprecedented
numbers, wiping out a public-health infrastructure that was weak in the
first place. One August day in Liberia, six pregnant women lost their
babies when hospitals couldn’t admit them for complications. Anyone
willing to treat Ebola victims ran the risk of becoming one.
Which brings us to the hero’s heart. There was little to stop the
disease from spreading further. Governments weren’t equipped to respond;
the World Health Organization was in denial and snarled in red tape.
First responders were accused of crying wolf, even as the danger grew.
But the people in the field, the special forces of Doctors Without
Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Christian medical-relief
workers of Samaritan’s Purse and many others from all over the world
fought side by side with local doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers and
burial teams.
Ask what drove them and some talk about God; some about country; some
about the instinct to run into the fire, not away. “If someone from
America comes to help my people, and someone from Uganda,” says Iris
Martor, a Liberian nurse, “then why can’t I?” Foday Gallah, an ambulance
driver who survived infection, calls his immunity a holy gift. “I want
to give my blood so a lot of people can be saved,” he says. “I am going
to fight Ebola with all of my might.”
MSF nurse’s assistant Salome Karwah stayed at the bedsides of
patients, bathing and feeding them, even after losing both her
parents—who ran a medical clinic—in a single week and surviving Ebola
herself. “It looked like God gave me a second chance to help others,”
she says. Tiny children watched their families die, and no one could so
much as hug them, because hugs could kill. “You see people facing death
without their loved ones, only with people in space suits,” says MSF
president Dr. Joanne Liu. “You should not die alone with space-suit
men.”
Those who contracted the disease encountered pain like they had never
known. “It hurts like they are busting your head with an ax,” Karwah
says. One doctor overheard his funeral being planned. Asked if surviving
Ebola changed him,
Dr. Kent Brantly turns
the question around. “I still have the same flaws that I did before,” he
says. “But whenever we go through a devastating experience like what
I’ve been through, it is an incredible opportunity for redemption of
something. We can say, How can I be better now because of what I’ve been
through? To not do that is kind of a shame.”
So that is the next challenge: What will we do with what we’ve
learned? This was a test of the world’s ability to respond to potential
pandemics, and it did not go well. It exposed corruption in African
governments along with complacency in Western capitals and jealousy
among competing bureaucrats. It triggered mistrust from Monrovia to
Manhattan. Each week brought new puzzles. How do you secure a country,
beyond taking passengers’ temperatures at the airport? Who has the power
to order citizens to stay home, to post a guard outside their door?
What will it take to develop treatments for diseases largely confined to
poor nations, even as this Ebola outbreak had taken far more lives by
mid-October than all the earlier ones combined?
The death in Dallas of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient
diagnosed on U.S. soil, and the infection of two nurses who treated him,
shook our faith in the ability of U.S. hospitals to handle this kind of
disease. From there the road to full freak-out was a short one. An Ohio
middle school closed because an employee had flown on the same plane as
one of Duncan’s nurses. Not the same flight, just the same plane. A
Texas college rejected applicants from Nigeria, since that country had
some “confirmed Ebola cases.” A Maine schoolteacher had to take a
three-week leave because she went to a teachers’ conference in Dallas.
Fear, too, was global. When a nurse in Spain contracted Ebola from a
priest, Spanish authorities killed her dog as a precaution, while
#VamosAMorirTodos (We’re all going to die) trended on Twitter. Guests at
a hotel in Macedonia were trapped in their rooms for days after a
British guest got sick and died. Turned out to have nothing to do with
Ebola.
The problem with irrational responses is that they can cloud the need
for rational ones. Just when the world needed more medical volunteers,
the price of serving soared. When nurse Kaci Hickox, returning from a
stint with MSF in Sierra Leone with no symptoms and a negative blood
test, was quarantined in a tent in Newark, N.J., by a combustible
governor, it forced a reckoning. “It is crazy we are spending so much
time having this debate about how to safely monitor people coming back
from Ebola-endemic countries,” says Hickox, “when the one thing we can
do to protect the population is to stop the outbreak in West Africa.”
Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere
close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and “us”
means everyone, not just those
in faraway
places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day.
The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and
women are willing to stand and fight. For tireless acts of courage and
mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for
persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are TIME’s
2014 Person of the Year. Culled from TIME Magazine.
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