Monique shrugged and said, ‘Many people don’t trust the needles.’
‘So I hear,’ said Tally, ‘I suppose it’s our job to reassure them. We all want your country to be free of Ebola.’
‘That’s what you people always say,’ said Monique.
Tally was puzzled. She had noticed Monique wince when she uttered the very word, Ebola and now her comment seemed to suggest that she might share her compatriots’ concerns. It was a strange situation. She had been feeling delighted and extraordinary lucky that she had met a local who spoke English, who was obviously educated and intelligent and could be possibly a hugely useful bridge between herself and the people she couldn’t communicate directly with and now, she had to be cautious about what she said next: she didn’t want to lose Monique. ‘You obviously have some worries about vaccination,’ she said gently.
‘The children are getting restless,’ said Monique, looking over shoulder.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Tally, ‘I’m sorry I kept you talking but I enjoyed our conversation.’
‘Me too,’ said Monique, smiling and clapping her hands as she walked back to her class. ‘Who can tell me...’
Tally continued her walk, absently taking in the sights and sounds but now preoccupied with thoughts about her meeting with Monique. All the stories she had heard about people being suspicious about vaccination she had been putting down to ignorance and superstition — often fuelled by witch doctors and adherence to ‘the old ways’. Monique would not be subject to these things and yet...
Tally stopped two more times to say hello to women she thought might respond but they weren’t interested and turned away.
‘Well, how did you get on?’ asked Mary when Tally got back to the Land Rover.
‘Interesting,’ Tally replied, ‘but not many wanted to talk.’
‘No one wants to talk about Ebola,’ said Mary.
‘Head in the sand syndrome,’ added Hans.
‘A bit unfair,’ said Mary, ‘I saw you met Monique Barbet.’
‘I did,’ said Tally. ‘She seemed lovely.’
‘She is. She was educated in Paris, spent time working in London and then came back to DRC — one of the few. People listen to her.’
‘Although she’s not without enemies,’ added Hans. ‘She’s seen as too big for her boots.’
‘Education can often be a big divider,’ said Mary. ‘Let’s move on.’
Tally got her first sight of a rural hospital in the next village. It was currently dealing with Ebola patients and didn’t look much like what she was used to seeing as a hospital — more a collection of huts with rudimentary fencing round it. A figure emerged from the door nearest them prompting a chill to run up her spine because of the protective clothing he or she was wearing. It wasn’t the Wellington boots or long gown or plastic apron that she found disturbing, but the hood and face visor that completely obscured the identity and personality of who might be wearing it — something that encouraged the imagination to run riot. A monster? A creature from outer space? A vision as far away as possible from the accepted caring image of a nurse. God knows what the patients must think, she wondered before reminding herself that a patient suffering from Ebola would be too engaged in their own nightmares to notice a new one arriving on the scene.
A second figure emerged and the pair went through the procedure of washing each other down and going through the disinfection procedure, a slow, careful and absolutely necessary procedure. The hoods and masks were removed to reveal two young and smiling female human beings, obviously relieved that their shift was over, sweat glistening on their faces, hair plastered to their heads.
‘Did you want to go into the hospital?’ Mary asked.
Tally said not. ‘No one should be going into these places without good reason and that includes us.’
Mary and Hans exchanged glances over seeing a new side to Tally, while she concentrated on the map of her region and the area she’d been given and said, ‘I can see there are six rural hospitals on my patch and a bigger one on the outskirts of Mbandaka, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, this one must be the one marked Alpha 3 on my map?’
‘Yes.’
Tally continued to ask questions with the aim of finding out what went on in the area she was to be managing under various conditions. She wanted to know what would happen when a patient fell ill in an area she picked out on the map at random, where they would be taken in the first instance, how long they would be held there, where they would be transferred to if thought appropriate, where and how they would be buried.
When Tally got back to the hut which was to be her management centre and had thanked Mary and Hans for their help and good company, she found a mound of paperwork waiting for her. Her planned peaceful evening after a tiring day disappeared in an instant.
Most of it was concerned with the help that had been flooding in from international agencies supporting the new initiative for dealing with serious outbreaks of disease. She was pleased to see that much of it comprised details of resources which had been already logged and listed and were available — very different to what usually happened when self-congratulation had been the order of the day from large countries when announcing monetary contributions which often failed to materialise or did without anyone following up on what really happened to it afterwards.
Tally got out her map again and started entering details of what was where in her region. It was so nice to have hard figures rather than rough estimates, which she noticed had been used in deciding how many cases of Ebola there had been. In the current outbreak. The May figures listed 46 cases of haemorrhagic fever of which 26 had died. 21 had been confirmed as Ebola, 21 as probable and four as ‘suspected’ The fact that four of the confirmed cases had occurred in the city of Mbandaka — some two hundred miles away from the village in her region where the outbreak was believed to have started was a worry. Many more cases could be out there, just not being reported.
Tally started going through the vaccination reports for her region. They listed the number of people who had been offered the vaccine, the number who had accepted and the numbers who had declined despite being possible contacts of confirmed cases. She entered these details on her map and looked at the big picture for almost a minute before letting out her breath in a long sigh. There was something wrong somewhere. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it would come to her. In the meantime, she picked up her phone to call Steven. She wanted his voice to be the last one she heard on a day that had been full of strange ones. There was no signal.
‘Oh, come on...’
Tally wandered around the room, holding the phone this way and that, complaining that there hadn’t been a problem yesterday before remembering that she had called Steven from the air-base not her new abode. She remembered the special phone that Steven insisted she carry and rummaged through her bag to find it still in the box he’d handed to her. She opened it to find the satellite phone and a solar energy charger as well as a conventional one. She felt guilty at not having checked out the phone earlier as she turned it on. She was left hoping that Steven might have charged it before giving it to her. He had.
Tally spent the following few days becoming accustomed to her new working environment and accepting the limitations imposed on progress by an unreliable communications network and a power supply that seemed more off than on. Each evening she would meet up with volunteers who updated her with information of their own as well as voicing accumulated doubts, fears, opinions and complaints about the way things were going.
This evening they had been discussing the various theories about where Ebola had come from in the first place. Its natural host had not been identified although there was a strong suggestion that fruit bats were the source. If this were so, these creatures could be responsible for infecting many other animals in the jungle like monkeys, antelopes, chimpanzees, regarded by many in the north of the country as delicious ‘bushmeat’.