By Artist/Cartoonist Leslie Lumeh
A few days ago, I participated in a workshop in the Netherlands that focused on the perspectives that emerge around a crisis and how to deal with them as an outsider. The crisis in this case is Ebola in Liberia. The perspectives are the myths or narratives that have crowded around Ebola since the disease broke out in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. One of the first narratives was the denial of the existence of the disease. It was believed it was a form of Malaria, or that it was a story concocted by the government to divert people’s attention from real issues. These narratives were soon replaced by other myths about Ebola being invented in a lab in Sierra Leone with the single goal of reducing the black population.
Dreams of Home by James Alexander Harding
JAMES ALEXANDER HARDING is a Photographer, born in Liberia, West Africa.
During a recent telephone conversation with my aunt, who lives in Liberia, I could hear trepidation in her voice for the first time. At the same time, though, she remained typically stoic, her faith in God unshakable after surviving two armed insurgencies. “They are saying on the radio that before January [2015] thousands of us will die,” said Auntie Arinah. “This thing is getting very scary. We rebuke those numbers!”
I couldn’t help feeling moved by my aunt’s tenacity in the midst of her anxiety. Ebola fatality projections seem to have created an atmosphere of psychological distress in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, nations still recovering from the trauma of conflict.
I hadn’t thought about the racial underbelly of Ebola airport surveillance until I experienced it for myself this week.
It all started at Heathrow Airport, where a “trainee” airline official asked me three times what I was doing in the UK even though I mentioned five times that I was a student, pointing emphatically to my very valid visa in a passport emblazoned with “Republic of Liberia” on the cover in gold letters.
His boss, a no-nonsense looking woman with dark hair and soft brown eyes, wanted proof of residence in the UK, something I had never been asked to show before. When I looked at her, visibly annoyed, she tried a different line of questioning.
“Do you have other proof that you are studying here?”
When I whipped out my school ID, she seemed momentarily appeased but not quite satisfied.
It is a silent war raging in my country, shaking the foundation of governance and eroding the modest […]
The people of Liberia and the West African region face an existential threat. The threat has implications beyond the sub-region and the African continent. The Ebola crisis constitutes a threat to international peace and security. It is far past time for the world community to step up its engagement from a “public health emergency of international concern” to a Chapter Seven Mandate to “Deliver as One.”
The evidence of the threat is abundant since the Ebola outbreak began making headlines worldwide a few months ago – the unfolding drama in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea with the decimation of large population segments, destruction of cherished human values, human insecurity on an unprecedented scale, including the absence of medical attention to non-Ebola ailments. Add to this the potential that if unchecked in time the virus could mutate, become transmissible and present a clearer and more present danger. Already some have begun to speak of a shift from linear growth to exponential, citing possibilities of 20,000 to 100,000 casualties in the months immediately ahead.
There is no math to the roads of Logan Town in Monrovia. In Logan Town, a name that sounds like “Lukin” when spoken with the northern Liberian accent of most of my relatives, the front of a cement house may face the side of another. Two back yards may serve as necessary borders for a make-shift zinc house. This asymmetry is what makes the middle-class neighborhoods of Monrovia and their residents as married as they are. Laughter is a group art, tears are just as intertwined and there are plenty of Ol’ Mas in the pot to choose from.
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Conversations on Liberia 