EBOLA WARD
About 10 a.m., Sunday, July 20
Next morning, while Simbirie Jalloh was riding in a taxi on her way to Kenema, a blood technician visited Humarr Khan on Sombo Street and drew a sample of his blood and brought it back to the Hot Lab. Just as the Hot Lab people had started testing Khan’s blood, Auntie went into cardiac arrest in the Ebola ward. An Ebola nurse named Alice Kovoma, who was tending her at the time, shouted for help, and she and the WHO doctor David Brett-Major started chest compressions on her and managed to resuscitate her. Auntie continued breathing on her own afterward, but she was in a coma. Alice Kovoma and another Ebola nurse named Nancy Yoko stayed at Auntie’s bedside, doing whatever they could to keep her alive. They couldn’t rouse her to consciousness.
The news that Auntie Mbalu’s life was hanging on a thread in the Ebola ward raced through the city of Kenema. The city revered her. Within minutes, worried people began coming in through the hospital gates and gathering in front of the Ebola ward, anxious for any news about Auntie’s condition. Many nurses and hospital staff were mixed in with the crowd, wearing civilian clothes—they had stopped working at the hospital. The crowd grew larger, and it began to get agitated.
People felt that the nurses’ candlelight vigil had failed. Wahab the Visioner’s prophecy had come to pass. More nurses were dying of Ebola, and now Kenema’s Auntie could die. The crowd got bigger, and louder, and shouts came out of the crowd. Auntie could not die. Incompetent fools on the hospital staff had let the virus spread all over the hospital, and now it had gotten into Auntie. If Auntie died, there was going to be payback, they shouted.
At about one o’clock a rumor went through the crowd that Auntie wasn’t in a coma, but that she had been dead for many hours. The rumor had it that the hospital staff was hiding the truth, afraid to announce the news for fear the hospital would be attacked by the mob.
There were young men in the crowd, hotheads. They began shouting that if Auntie was dead and the staff was lying they would burn the hospital to the ground. The nurses had brought the virus to Kenema, the men shouted. The hospital staff was responsible for all the deaths in Kenema. And now they had killed Auntie. The young men whipped the crowd into a mutinous rage, and it grew larger and larger as more and more people joined the mob. The crowd had the numbers and the passion to destroy Kenema Government Hospital.
In the crisis center in the Library, Lina Moses heard the shouting and noise of the crowd around the Ebola ward. Mbalu Fonnie and her late husband Richard Fonnie had a teenage daughter named Martiko. Moses suddenly realized that Martiko was probably near the Ebola ward waiting for news of her mother. Martiko could be in danger, she thought, because the crowd was sounding violent. Lina ran out of the crisis center and up the hill to the Ebola ward, shouting, “Martiko! Martiko! Where are you?”
She found Auntie’s daughter alone in the crowd, with nobody to protect her, and she was sobbing. People in the mob were shouting that Auntie was dead.
Lina wrapped her arms around the girl and held her. “Mbalu isn’t dead,” she said to the girl. “If your mother was dead I would know.”
Just then, a series of piercing shrieks came out of the Ebola ward. Two nurses were screaming.
Lina knew immediately what it was. She kept her arms wrapped around Auntie’s daughter.
The crowd paused in its agitation, and grew momentarily quiet, listening to the screams coming out of the ward. The nurses’ screams went on and on, an aria of unfathomable loss. As the cries fell over the crowd, their meaning began to sink in. Auntie had just died. The nurses’ cries wouldn’t stop, and they seemed to cool the crowd like falling rain. Sounds of weeping started in the crowd, gusts of sobs, until the entire crowd was in tears, and the mob collapsed in upon itself, all of its anger gone. The shrieks of the nurses kept coming out of the ward.
Lina Moses began to worry that something dreadful was happening inside the building. She told Auntie’s daughter that she’d be right back. And then she ran straight through the doors of the Ebola ward and into the red zone.
There was no time to put on safety gear, not even rubber gloves. Lina ran down the narrow corridor, past the cubicles, headed for the screams, trying not to notice too much around her, trying to keep herself focused on getting to the nurses. The smell was beyond description. Patients were naked, or were lying in soiled clothing. She saw red eyes, people near death, people dead, filth and liquids on the floor, which was slippery under her hiking boots. Moses had always told herself that she had good instincts for knowing where the virus was and where it wasn’t, and now she knew where it was. The virus was everywhere around her, on every surface, every bed, every person, every wall. The ward was a melted reactor core of virus, and she ran through it toward the screams, trying not to touch anything.