WUNRN
SIERRA LEONE – AN EBOLA ORPHAN GIRL’S PLEA: “DO YOU WANT ME?”
By JEFFREY
GETTLEMAN - DEC. 13, 2014
Her unflagging
attention to her dying mother was why the health care workers started calling
her Sweetie Sweetie. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
PORT LOKO, Sierra Leone — Sweetie Sweetie had no choice. Her father had
just died of Ebola.
So had her sister. Her mother was vomiting blood and fading fast.
When the ambulance arrived and her mother climbed in, Sweetie Sweetie
climbed in, too. Ebola
had been like a pox on her entire house, and even though the young girl looked
fine, with no symptoms, nobody in her village, even relatives, wanted to take
her. With nowhere else to go, she followed her mother all the way into the red
zone of an Ebola clinic and spent more than two weeks in a biohazard area where
the only other healthy people were wearing moon suits.
As her mother grew sicker, Sweetie Sweetie urged her to take her pills. She
tried to feed her. She washed her mother’s soiled clothes, not especially well,
but nurses said they were moved by the effort. After all, they think Sweetie
Sweetie is only 4. Health care workers did not even know her real name, which
is why they called her Sweetie Sweetie.
After her mother died, the young girl stood outside the clinic’s gates
looking around with enormous brown eyes. There was no one to pick her up. She
was put on the back of a motorbike and taken to a group home, whose bare, dim
hallways she now wanders alone. Social workers are trying to find someone to
adopt her, and Sweetie Sweetie seems to know she is up for grabs.
On a recent day she asked a visitor: “Do you want me?”
Ebola has been wretched for children. More than 3,500 have been infected
and at least 1,200 have died, United Nations officials estimate. Sierra
Leone, Liberia
and Guinea,
the most-afflicted countries, have shut down schools in an attempt to check the
virus, and legions of young people are now being drafted into hard labor by
their impoverished parents. Little boys who should be sitting in a classroom
are breaking rocks by the side of the road; little girls struggle under
gigantic loads of bananas on their heads. This was always true to some degree,
but social workers say there are more children, especially teenagers, on the
streets than ever before, which could lead to an increase in crime and
adolescent pregnancies. When the schools do reopen, there will probably be many
vacant seats.
But the worst off, by far, are the Ebola orphans. The United Nations
Children’s Fund, or Unicef, says that across the region there may be 10,000 of
them. Many are stigmatized and shunned by their own communities.
“If there’s an earthquake or a war, and you lose a mother or a father, an
aunt will take care of you,” said Roeland Monasch, head of Unicef’s office in
Sierra Leone. “But this is different. These children aren’t being taken in by
extended family. This isn’t like the AIDS orphans.”
People in hard-hit Ebola areas see children as mini time bombs. They do not
wash their hands very often, they constantly touch people, they break all the
Ebola rules. Something as simple as changing a diaper becomes a serious risk
because the virus is spread through bodily fluids.
“Younger children are believed to be more contagious,” Mr. Monasch said.
Even if that is not true, the stigma remains, and many families have been
reluctant to absorb children from Ebola-stricken households because of worries
that those children might sicken their own.
Sierra Leone, which now has more cases of Ebola than
anywhere else, was already a profoundly difficult place for a child.
Nine out of 10 girls undergo genital cutting, one of the highest rates in the
world, and during the civil war in the 1990s, thousands of boys fought as child
soldiers. Today, armies of young men with arms or legs cut off, gruesome
reminders of the war, beg for the equivalent of pennies in the market.
Literacy is low, child mortality high. Nearly a fifth of children do not
make it to 5. Child advocates say that rate is likely to increase because of
reductions in immunizations and all the Ebola deaths.
It is a miracle that Sweetie Sweetie even survived. She slept in a bed next
to her sick mother in a crowded isolation unit with people dying all around her
from a deadly, contagious pathogen. She was never given a protective suit —
health workers said that was not the protocol, and there were none even close
to her size.
She made her bed every morning and tried to keep her mother’s spirits up —
her unflagging attention was why the health workers started calling her Sweetie
Sweetie. The area she comes from, a village near Port Loko, an old river
town east of the capital, Freetown, has been ravaged by Ebola. But so far,
Sweetie Sweetie has not shown any symptoms.
Social workers have been trying to piece together her story, but her mother
entered the clinic in bad shape and was delirious, making it difficult to
ascertain all the facts. Sweetie Sweetie does not talk much either. But from
what was gleaned from her and snatches of conversation with her mother, the
social workers believe she is about 4 years old, her father was a medicine man
and her real name might be Mbalu Kamara, though the lead social worker handling
her case was quick to add that all that remains “unconfirmed.”
No relatives seem to be looking for her.
The only family member social workers have been able to find was a man they
described as an uncle. They said he was an alcoholic and not fit to raise her.
For now, she continues to live in a group home with nine other children,
some who have lost their parents, others who have simply been lost in the maze
of isolation centers and Ebola clinics — sometimes the little plastic bracelets
with a child’s name on it fall off, sometimes records disappear.
None of the other children in the group home looked especially healthy —
twice a day their temperatures are taken to make sure they are not coming down
with Ebola. One infant was sucking on an empty box of milk, clearly hungry.
Another little boy kept shielding his eyes, even though he was sitting in the
shade. He had survived Ebola but his eyes still hurt. The house smelled like
dried fish.
The children spend a lot of time sitting in plastic chairs. Occasionally
they play a game like Simon Says. “Watch this,” one of the social workers said.
He waved over Sweetie Sweetie, who appeared in front of him in a stained frock.
“Ebola says,” he announced. Sweetie Sweetie quietly answered: “Don’t touch.”
The person most interested in adopting Sweetie Sweetie is a young health
care worker who treated her mother and said the mother’s dying wish was for him
to look after the little girl.
His name is Usman Koroma, and when he was tracked down at a rundown
teachers’ college in Port Loko and asked if he knew a girl known as Sweetie
Sweetie, the first thing he said was: “She’s mine.”
He explained, in what seemed an eager but heartfelt way, how he had fed her
extra portions of rice, oranges, soup and cassava porridge in the clinic, to
boost her immunity.