by Frank Perry
“We are a poor nation … a poor continent!” We have no wealth, no oil, nothing to cause the ‘civilized’ governments of the world to care. They make a movie about our mass killings for blood diamonds, but not about the disease that could kill more than half the world population if it ever escapes. Our job is only to keep the disease away from your modern countries: it is not about curing anything.”
She couldn’t disagree; his cynicism wasn’t misplaced. She’d argued in front of her county’s parliament, in front of both chambers, yet nothing substantial had ever been done. She was paid a small salary by the WHO and shipped away with hundreds of other UN medical volunteers to please the minds of bureaucrats, nothing more. She looked down at her small paper cup of water, aware that she was needed back in the triage tent, fully covered in her bio-resistant suit, in less than one hour. “Over eight hundred medical workers have died here. Some days it seems like it is all for nothing.” At least there was some hope that the sick entering triage can leave again if the disease did not develop. She looked at him, then at the tent door. “What is that?” A loud mob was approaching.
They stood and rushed to the tent entrance as a crowd of native villagers charged at the isolation tent with large knives hacking the side walls to shreds. Abagael ran out yelling. “No! … Stop, you cannot go near …” She was pushed to the ground from behind by a young thin black man wearing tattered jeans and a faded short sleeve shirt. He started to raise his machete before another villager pushed him away yelling something she couldn’t understand. Stunned, Phillipe lifted her off the ground and carried her back into the rest tent. He probably saved her life. She looked back out the door in shocked disbelief, “What’s going on Phillipe; what’s happening?”
More villagers ran past the opening and he didn’t respond immediately, listening to their yells. “It is bad.”
“What … what is bad?”
He listened more. “They have come to take the young mother, the girl you were with. She is pregnant and they think we are doing something terrible to her. They say nobody ever comes out of this tent. They say we are cutting up their people and doing things with their organs.”
“That’s insane! We’re trying to help. We must stop them, they will all be infected!” Phillipe didn’t say anything but grabbed her hand and ran out the other side of the tent. She protested, obviously scared. “What are you doing?”
“Run Abagael – run!” He didn’t have time to explain. They ran together to the dormitory, an old school building which was further inside their makeshift compound, away from the villagers.
Moments later, inside the dorm lobby, both physicians were breathing hard. She was shaking with fear and stared back toward the clinical tents. “What just happened, Phillipe … what were those men doing? Why are they so upset?” She didn’t need to understand the language to understand their actions.
He bent over with his hands on his knees then straightened. “It is hard to explain, Abagael. You see, this is an illiterate country. The villagers believe in spirits; they have their gods. Sometimes we, as doctors, are defiling their beliefs. It is why so many of them do not come to us. They fear us. We only see them when it is hopeless.”
“You cannot mean that, so many have died here for more than two decades. Surely, they know we can help.”
“What have they seen? They only know that when they bring someone sick to us, once they are inside our tent, they will never be seen again. They come here and die with no family allowed to be with them. The bodies are disposed in some sacrilegious way, sacrilegious by their beliefs.”
“Not all have died, we have saved some. If they are strong and have strong immune systems, they can survive.”
“Yes, but the numbers are small. You know very well that all we do is sedate them and let nature take its course. Almost all die.” The uproar of the mob at the isolation tent was abating and some of the villagers could be seen walking more slowly away, some struggling to carry dying patients, but it was impossible to see inside the remains of the isolation tent from their position. “The young girl you were tending, she was pregnant according to what I was hearing from the mob.”
“Oh, I didn’t notice, it’s difficult sometimes to see them clearly, and she could not talk. What a shame that two should die in one body.”
He continued. “That is not the point. In our culture, when a woman dies, and she is pregnant, the baby must be removed from the body and buried separately. Otherwise, their souls will not pass into the village of the dead. The bodies should also be buried next to their homes to show respect to the dead. Otherwise, the family will be haunted. It is a very serious belief.”
She slumped onto a chair despairing. “When will it be safe for us to return? There are patients over there who need our help, even if it is just easing their pain and fear a bit.”
He looked briefly. “It won’t be long. They will just remove the body and hopefully do little more damage. Of course they will not act kindly to any interference.”
They stood together looking out from the doorway. “How can we get through to them, Phillipe? How can they be made to understand that they are spreading the disease? Many of the cases we see now are from mishandled corpses. The virus is most deadly in bodies for several days. Many people can die from one corpse then each of their bodies spreads even more death. It is a never-ending and expanding cycle. How can we end it?” Her face was buried in hands for a moment, then she pushed back her sweaty hair. “Maybe I should take a shower and read a book.”
He smiled kindly. “You will never leave your patients. You can rest in three weeks when we all go back to our homes.” The new group from Doctors-Without-Borders and other world organizations would be arriving and this group could forget the horrors for a time.
“I want to go back to the tent, now.” She was beyond scared and just angry that ignorance had disrupted their mission. “Come, Phillipe, we must go back.” He followed dutifully behind the Chief Medical Officer as she rushed back toward the clinic. They arrived at the isolation tent, to a horrific scene. All the dead and dying patients were missing. Some of the medical staff was on the ground, bleeding but moving; some were not. Salia was slumped over the cot where the young mother had been; the hood of her protective suit was split nearly in half. She had died instantly.
Neither Abagael nor Phillipe had dressed in protective suits. She yelled, “Check the other tents, then get to the decon station fast. I’ll help these people.” Medical staff from the rest of the clinic rushed in to help when they saw their comrades risking their lives without protective suits in the isolation area. Together, a dozen people helped the wounded toward the decon area. The space was not designed for so many at once, but they all managed to disrobe in a foggy mist of chlorine spray. It would be three weeks before they could know for sure if any of them had been infected. It would take less time to reconstruct the clinic and continue their work. If more patients died at their homes or under the care of a witchdoctor, the death rate would skyrocket. There was no stopping the disease without outside help or total population annihilation. Abagael had been planning to instruct all the staff on the protocol for a new vaccine received only the day before. Her associates at GHI had sent it with the hope that it would stop the current outbreak. She needed something to place hope in.
Flight
He felt it coming. The little plane was bouncing around like lint in a vacuum cleaner, flying low over the ocean at only three thousand feet, more or less, according to the pilot. The outside view through the small rear window was just shades of grey; lightest above, darkness all around and black below. It was late afternoon, but it could have been the middle of the night with no hint of sunshine anywhere. The Atlantic was foaming in all directions from storm swells and high winds, colliding with the tidal surge, causing peaks of whitish puffs and frigid spray ripped from wave tops. He grabbed his midsection, closing his eyes, as the pilot pi
tched and turned around rain squalls. Normally, the flight from Portland to the coastal islands off the Maine coast would be smooth, flying at ten thousand feet, and the air service planes didn’t fly in bad weather. This was as poor as it ever got before they would be grounded. By flying low this evening, under the cloud ceiling, the island was vaguely visible to the pilot, who knew where to look, but nowhere in sight of John. If they flew higher, the clouds would obscure it all and the island had neither instrument landing aides nor runway lights.
Matinicus Island lies twenty-three miles from the Maine coast. If he hadn’t been desperate to leave in a hurry, he would have found a cheap hotel and hidden until the weather cleared. He hated small planes, but the boat service to the islands only ran four days a week, and he didn’t want to wait for the next boat. Even if this had been the right day for the boats, the ocean was too rough on this late October day, and they would have stayed in port. John had no choice. He had to fly. Combining his fear of small planes along with the poor weather, he
