COVID-19 is not Ebola, there are many differences – let’s be clear about that. We should not make lazy, over-simplistic comparisons and draw lessons that are not there. Let’s get that disclaimer out of the way first. But, of course there are so many comparisons, and lessons, that can, and should be drawn.
As the past few weeks of the COVID-crisis have gone on, my mind has been, sub-consciously and consciously, increasingly dredging more and more anecdotes, faces and memories from Street Child’s, and my personal, Ebola days into the front of my thinking.
As I shared with those of you who joined our webinar event on Thursday, Kpondu village, Sierra Leone, is one place I have been thinking about especially.
I wouldn’t want to pick my single most harrowing day of Street Child work - specialising in the world’s toughest places, alas, there are a few to choose from. But high on any short-list would include my first visit to Kpondu, a remote, pretty Sierra Leonean village set in lush hills, a stone’s throw from both Guinea and Liberia, in November 2014. Six-months earlier Ebola had ravaged Kpondu and the surrounding area - killing tens, making orphans of many more. And now, compounding this loss, the economic impact of a missed harvest, due to the nationwide restrictions on movement in a place to combat the virus, was visibly starting to bite - as it was across the country. Trauma, hunger and despondency hung thick in the air.
However, what I have written thus far of Kpondu I could have equally, tragically, have said of any number of communities I visited in Sierra Leone in those days. But in Kpondu there was a potent extra factor that made the atmosphere especially dark: Kpondu was where it had all started in Sierra Leone, where the virus had radiated out from - and everyone knew it. 325 of Sierra Leone’s first Ebola cases were traced back to the funeral of Finda Nymah, held in Kpondu in April 2014. In the traditional custom, many of the funeral-goers had contact with the body of the deceased and then with each other; something we now know was a lethally effective way of communicating Ebola. Everyone in that village knew that its name would now live in infamy - a shame and compounding anguish sat over Kpondu.
The road leading into Kpondu, where the chief of Kissi-Teng expressed his anguish and frustration at not being told how to prevent the Ebola crisis that befell his people.
Perhaps I do the place no favours by writing about it, recycling these facts. But I’m doing it because the sentiments that day were strong - and there is a message here that I want to share. I don’t actually just want to share it, I feel obliged to - and it is the message that is defining the character of the early stages of Street Child’s COVID-19 work: an urgent focus on awareness-raising and prevention activity, especially in remote and marginalised locations. The chief of Kissi-Teng, the chiefdom that Kpondu sits in accompanied us that day and what I remember above all was the anger, anguish and exasperation with which he exclaimed, “Why didn’t they tell us? Why were we not told? We could have prevented this . . .”. He said it with such passion and vigour, in a private conversation as our car bounced around on the way from his home in Koindu town to the villages, that we then asked him to say it again to camera when we got out, but as so often happens, it came over stilted and formal.
And of course he had a point. Ebola’s existence in the region had been known about for months, yet the key preventative messages had not reached Kpondu that day in April 2014. And so they did what they usually do at a funeral. And disaster ensued. The ‘World’, blame which ever part of it you want, had not made the effort to get to Kpondu. Perhaps that was because Kpondu was in Sierra Leone, even though it was virtually in Guinea and Liberia - and people thought therefore that Kpondu was not a priority, because ‘Ebola was not in Sierra Leone’. You hear variations on the same kind of lines going around now. ‘COVID-19 is mainly in the cities in Africa’. ‘COVID-19 is mainly a problem of the elites in Africa’. ‘COVID-19 mainly kills old people and Africa has fewer old people’. These statements may be true - but will they stay true; and for how long? Who can know?
This is why, with every muscle in our body, Street Child will spend the next few weeks playing its part in taking the key messages about COVID-19 to the furthest, and hardest to reach places. We are starting with our own network and communities - but if funds allow, we will scale from there, as we did in the Ebola crisis. It is why we have set ourselves the massive but vital goal of mobilising our global network of 44 amazing local NGOs in the 14 countries we work in to reach 1 million of the world’s most remote and vulnerable people with information and/or services (mainly soap and water!) that materially increase their protection against COVID-19.
Had a trusted community worker, or health officer made it to Kpondu anytime before that funeral on 10th April 2014 - an event which might have cost just a hundred, or two hundred, pounds to organise - who knows what human devastation, and dramatic economic cost, could have been averted.
That’s the insight driving us.
A feature of many of the villages where Ebola took hold was not just how weak their health-care system was, but that ‘education’ was not a project that yet taken off. Kpondu was one of those villages.
In normal weather, education is at the heart of Street Child’s work. Fulfilling a promise I made to the chief and villages that day in November 2014, in 2016 Street Child joyfully completed construction of Kpondu’s first-ever primary school, which we now help the community run. It sits in splendid isolation outside the village itself, in a strategic location where children from a dozen surrounding villages and hamlets can access it. Perhaps poetically the project was funded by the family and friends of a lady called Kate Gross who sadly died way too young herself on Christmas Day 2014. I never knew Kate, but we were at the same university at the same time and it has been poignant to think of her too, on the times I have visited the school since.
The primary school in Kpondu, funded in by friends and family of Kate Gross.