Ebola - Maseray's Story

I am an Ebola survivor. My husband and my sister are not. They are among the 3,900 Ebola victims who have died in Sierra Leone in the year since the epidemic began.

Life as my family knew it ended when Ebola began. Before, I was a multi-tasking mother, grandmother and wife. My husband, Issa, was a Teacher and we raised five children in the small concrete-block house that we built in Bo, Sierra Leone’s second largest city. I worked as a laundress, washing and ironing neighbour’s clothes, earning about £5.80 per day. My daughter, Augusta, gave us two beautiful grandchildren. We did not have much, but as I realise now, we were happy.

In late May 2014 we heard rumours that a deadly disease had spread to Sierra Leone from neighbouring Guinea. Many people argued that Ebola did not really exist. They believed witchcraft was killing people, not an invisible virus. Others heeded the wisdom of pastors and imams who preached about Ebola prevention. They saved many lives.

The Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone was the perfect storm: an unprecedented epidemic that collided with our struggling health clinics and hospitals. In those early days, even the experts were unsure how to contain its rapid-fire spread. Few people understood that Ebola spread through contact with infected patients and that the virus stayed in bodily fluids even after death. Our sacred tradition—shared by Christians and Muslims—of washing our deceased loved ones before burial soon became an unwitting suicide mission for grieving families.

Health officials organized ’body collections,’ but often it took days for burial teams to arrive. For Muslims who must bury their dead before sundown, this was horrific. Christians weren’t permitted to perform the funeral rites that honour the deceased over days. Mourners watched helplessly as overwhelmed undertakers loaded their parents, their children into trash bags and tossed them into pickup trucks, never to be seen again. Soon people resisted the authorities—hiding the sick and burying their dead in secret.

By the time the government reluctantly declared a national public health emergency on July 31, 500 people were infected. Fear and stigma mushroomed. Police arrested suspected Ebola patients; the corpses of others lay in the streets.

For months my family escaped Ebola, relieved and grateful. But my world collapsed in October when my 30-year-old daughter died after delivering her third child, leaving her two young daughters in our care. Would I be able to protect them from Ebola?

My husband worked in Freetown and lived with my sister’s family. The capital was an Ebola hot zone. I begged them to be careful. Stay inside. Wash your hands constantly. Don’t attend the funerals of even close friends. Somehow, it was me, soon after I’d gone to Freetown to visit them, who was the next in our family to contract Ebola.

I was afraid when the stomach cramps and vomiting hit me. I called the national 117 hotline, and an ambulance soon arrived. Fallay and my husband felt ill too, but they refused to go with me to the hospital. No one came back from the Ebola ward, they said. It is a death sentence. How I regret not convincing them to get in that ambulance.

I tested positive for Ebola. For three days I lay among the dying and the dead. The pain crippled me and at times I almost gave up fighting the virus. I watched as nurses tried to manage the mayhem. They lacked plastic gloves to care for contagious patients, let alone clean the floors slick with vomit and faeces. They tossed food at us like prisoners for fear of touching the contaminated. Orderlies piled the dead in a corner, often dropping corpses on their heads. My heart especially broke for the women—naked, exposed—no one to protect their dignity in death. I vowed to God: if I leave here alive I will do something to honour the memory of these sisters.

Pumped full of fluids, I defeated the dehydration that ultimately claims many Ebola patients. After 72 hours, I was released, but the celebration was short-lived. Relatives broke the news to me that my husband and sister, as well as my aunt, had all died of Ebola while I was in the hospital.

Widowed. Unemployed. Unemployable. Being an Ebola survivor became my new identity. At 53, I had two granddaughters to raise, but no one would hire me. Neighbours shunned me, blaming me for spreading the disease. While I was in hospital, they had burned the goods I’d bought to sell in the local market. My landlord threatened to evict me. In December, I heard that World Vision was hiring workers to conduct safe and dignified burials for Ebola victims. As a survivor, I am immune to the disease and faced less risk. I recalled my promise to God and to those women on the hospital floor. I was the first woman Ebola survivor to join the team.

Since then, I have buried 70 of my fellow Sierra Leoneans. My first burial was a one-year-old baby girl. Our team ensures that families have a chance to say a proper farewell while ensuring that they themselves stay safe from the disease. As one of only 10 women on our team of 800 workers, my role is to ensure that women are treated with dignity as we dress and place the body in the protective bag. A minister or imam is present to pray, and the family walks to the gravesite with us. It is hard for people to put aside their comforting rituals and traditions. But extreme times call for extreme measures, as our president reminds us.

Surviving Ebola is a miracle of God. As a Christian, I joined the burial team as a way of giving thanks to him. I also see our work as a service to our country in the war on Ebola. To date, we have buried more than 9,000 people with grace and dignity.

I am so honoured to have been chosen for the Bond International Humanitarian Award on behalf of my team. I want to thank our British friends – everyone who donated to our work, and the UK government for giving us the grant to make our burial work possible. Amid the despair of Ebola, you walked with us. You enabled us to bury our loved ones the way you would bury your own – with dignity, respect and honour. Recovering from Ebola will take us years. But we will find comfort on the hard path to healing knowing that we did right by our parents, our spouses and our children in death. Thank you for your gift of grace. We are winning the war on Ebola, but it is not over yet. Please keep fighting with us.

Maseray Kamara represents 803 burial team workers who received the 2015 Bond International Humanitarian Award on 1 June. They serve with SMART (Social Mobilisation And Respectful Burials Through faith-based alliance), a UK aid-funded consortium headed by World Vision in partnership with Catholic Relief Services and CAFOD.