Life at Ebola 'Ground Zero'

05 March 2015 - 02:16 By Reuters
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ROOT CAUSE: Etienne Ouamouno at the base of a tree in his village inhabited by bats, from which his two-year-old son might have been the first person to contract Ebola in its current outbreak
ROOT CAUSE: Etienne Ouamouno at the base of a tree in his village inhabited by bats, from which his two-year-old son might have been the first person to contract Ebola in its current outbreak
Image: MISHA HUSSAIN/REUTERS

A charred kapok tree and about a dozen graves scattered among the mud brick houses of Meliandou are painful reminders of the toll Ebola has taken on this village in southeast Guinea.

Scientists traced the source of the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola to two-year-old Emile Ouamouno, whom they believe contracted the disease while playing near the tree, home to hundreds of bats that might have been hosting the deadly virus.

The boy's father, Etienne Ouamouno, said Emile fell ill in December 2013 and infected his sister and mother, who was eight months pregnant. Over a year later, having lost all his immediate family, Etienne Ouamouno has difficulty in finding words to describe his grief.

For now, his body language does the talking.

Sitting at the foot of the kapok tree, which has since been set alight by the villagers to smoke out the bats, Ouamouno nervously lights a cigarette and takes a number of short drags in quick succession.

There is a long, uncomfortable silence as he contemplates the significance of this spot. Almost 24000 people, most of them in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, have been infected with Ebola and about 9700 have been killed by it as a result of the chain of transmission that started here.

"It wasn't Emile that started it," Ouamouno finally says. "He was too young to eat bats, and he was too small to be playing in the bush all on his own. He was always with his mother."

For Ouamouno and thousands of others in the forest region of southeastern Guinea, once the bread basket of the West African nation, the suffering has only deepened. Ebola has left them scared, frustrated and jobless.

"There's food on the market but not enough money to buy it.

"About 100000 people are out of work since the mining companies closed because of Ebola," said Jean-Luc Siblot, emergency co-ordinator for the World Food Programme in Guinea.

"Closure of the borders with Ivory Coast, Liberia and Mali, and the unwillingness of food transporters to come into the region, left agricultural collectives stuck with their produce," Siblot said.

Jobs have dried up in virtually all the communities in the forest region. Farmers in other parts of the country say up to half of their crops had spoiled because they could not be sold across borders.

The World Food Programme estimates that up to a million people do not get three meals a day and many have to sell their assets to buy food.

Ebola has made this worse.

In January, global aid agency Oxfam called for a multimillion-dollar post-Ebola "Marshall Plan" - similar to the US aid programme to help rebuild shattered European economies after World War 2 - to help Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The idea was revived on Tuesday as the African leaders met foreign donors in Brussels to discuss their response to Ebola.

Back in Meliandou, villagers were sceptical of the government's intentions.

"The government has never done anything for us in the past, so why would they change now," said Ouamouno, reflecting the view of many in this largely anti-government region of the country.

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