(ANS - Monrovia) - "Ebola is a treacherous enemy because it is invisible. It is ruthlessly efficient fighter, a terrorist that attacks according to the classic doctrine of guerrilla warfare, undermining people’s psychological balance even before is strikes physically." So wrote the Italian journalist Sergio Ramazzotti, in a long article with the title, "Death will come before my eyes”.  While he was writing for the magazine "Vanity Fair", he availed of of the support of the Salesians in Monrovia.  We quote some excerpts with the author’s permission: 

 (...) The new rules governing social relations in Monrovia are simple: if you touch someone who has touched the wrong person, you die. Get into   the wrong taxi and you die. If you rub your eye, or light a cigarette with a hand that has touched the wrong thing or the wrong person, you die.

Ebola is a treacherous enemy because it is invisible, ruthless efficiency of a fighter, a terrorist attack in the classic doctrine of guerrilla warfare to undermine the psychological balance even before the physical. How do you live in fear of a handshake, or a taxi? Ebola has a message for you: You create your own destiny. The choice is between going out and deal with it, putting the right amount of fatalism to not go crazy, or lock you in the house for an indefinite period, a prisoner of your neurosis.

The disaster of Liberia (the country hardest hit by the epidemic, followed by Sierra Leone and Guinea) is the result of months of laxity, an incredible superficiality in dealing with the first cases broke out earlier this year, dell'ignavia almost criminal to a government that has lost control of the situation: the virus spreads at the speed of Facebook. "The infections are increasing in geometric progression," he says Saverio Bellizzi, an epidemiologist sassarese responsible for mapping the cases of Ebola in the center set up in Monrovia by Doctors without Borders. "We expect an exponential increase of the dead."

(...) It is the medieval plague, the return of the Black Death, when, as Boccaccio wrote, "people dined at home with family and supped with their ancestors in paradise." The quote is not mine but the New Democrat, a local newspaper. In fact, everything in Monrovia, evokes the Middle Ages, the plague: the promiscuity in which people live in slums, the gloomy sky full of clouds, the incessant rain, the puddles of dirty yellowish mud that sinks to the ankle, the crows circling the mountains of garbage, corpses abandoned on the street, the teams Monatti who collect them. Ambulances rushing day and night, and the sound of every siren is the tolling of a death knell: 85 percent of infected die.

Ebola is the coup de grace to a society devastated by 15 years of civil war and managed by an inept ruling class, addicted welfarism NGOs and international aid, corrupt beyond belief and indifferent to the fate of the country, given that Liberia was founded by the descendants of American slaves, and every Liberian political self-respecting American passport and has family living overseas: September 15th president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has dismissed ten senior officials who refused to return home to handle the emergency.

The government has moved too late, and only when the epidemic reached the capital was declared a state of emergency. The curfew - from 23 to six in the morning - had as one consequence, in Monrovia, the increase in robberies and armed robberies. Schools are closed until further notice, as well as most of the public offices and the 'non-essential': the idea is to minimize the contacts, but the result is that people, who no longer work, pass the days on the road, in fact multiplying the chances of infection.

Apart from the four centers of care for people with ebola, not only remained a functioning hospital, some because they are infected, others because the staff is dead or fled, according to the latest count, the doctors Liberians throughout the country are 52. people, well, die for the most trivial causes.

(...) Many of the NGOs have suspended operations and repatriated foreign employees. In late August the Interior Ministry had put under quarantine districts most at risk, imprisoning the population within a cordon of armed police, till the people, exasperated by hunger, forced the lock. There have been shootings, we ran the dead and the quarantine was, for now, revoked. The economy is destroyed, public servants without pay for more than two months. There are all the ingredients for yet another civil war.

When six private, you understand why man invented the handshake. People are hysterical, arguing over nothing. The psychosis of contagion spread by the posters hanging in the city ("Do not touch Do not Embrace!") Crumbles to the company, produces tension and the need to download it first scapegoat: the corrupt government, the United States ("The virus l 'have synthesized the Americans to exterminate us Africans! "), the ethnic or religious minorities. "It is the fault of the Muslims," he says a man leaving the Sunday mass. "They keep the dead in the house three days before doing so take away, wash it and spray water on him." Needless to point out to him that Christians - 85 percent in Liberia - do the same, and are equally reluctant to send to the crematorium the dead of ebola, as the law provides. Or that some priests - "To save just the blood of Christ" - they refused to put at the entrance of the port binding of bin chlorinated water for disinfection of hands.

Young student volunteers run the slum, shack to shack, to raise awareness about hygiene standards of prevention. I've seen them try in vain to convince men resentful due to the hunger that should not be eaten bush meat - the flesh of animals of the forest, monkeys and bats in particular, suspected of spreading the infection - and deliver to their wives buckets, bleach and instructions for preparing the disinfectant solution, while a few steps the children rolled around naked in the sludge.

The buckets with chlorinated water (bleach solution of 0.05 per cent is enough to kill the virus) are located at the entrance of almost every building. The slogan is: wash your hands as often as you can. But I myself, many times these days, I'm surprised not to have done when I should have, and then I spent the nights to analyze the signals my body and I thought I would send each intensified by anxiety, in fear of falling asleep and waking up with the first symptoms, subtly trivial: headache, fever, joint pain, stomach pain, nausea, sore throat, bloodshot eyes. Many Liberians have developed the same "prior hypochondria." The problem is that they are not even the majority. For many others, ebola does not exist. Or if there is not lethal. Or if it is lethal is the result of the evil eye. So much so that the other ubiquitous slogan is "Ebola is real!" Evangelization rather than prevention: first to explain to people how to defend themselves from Satan, you have to convince her of its existence.

The closest allies of ebola, in fact, the tradition, ignorance and superstition. I notice accompanying the volunteers of the Red Cross teams funeral Liberian Monatti "two point zero" of this plague of the third millennium, on board the jeep, turn the city seven days a week to collect any suspicion corpse - the dead are contagiosissimi , and remain for a long time - and download it to the crematorium of Marshall Road. In a time that seems far away, but that's just yesterday, the crematorium was reserved for the Hindu community. Now anyone who dies becomes, despite himself, Hindus, and the corpses are so many that, to dispose of them, he did get an additional incinerator Europe.

The day of Monatti begins at nine in the morning and ends after sunset, but in all those hours, a team can muster no more than three or four bodies. Maybe they were the same family to call them. But then they see these evil spirits in white suit and get a strange liquid spray everywhere - which is the usual chlorinated water, but who in their ignorance they are convinced it is the poison of the spreaders - and steal the body of their loved one to burn, after having beaten on the pick-up along with other bodies, in closed plastic bags. And then they change their minds, they refuse to give it, and part of an exhausting negotiation. (...)

The same ostracism touches the infected healed: people are afraid of them and shuns them. Although, ironically, the black market flourishes of their blood - having developed immunity, might contain the antidote - which often turns out to be bogus.

(...) Each day, the sick are crowded at the entrance of the center of Doctors Without Borders. They arrive by ambulance, taxi, someone in motion. The weakest accasciano in the mud, clinging to the gates and pray to be hospitalized. The staff in protective suit is often forced to reject them: the 160 beds (out of a total of 360 throughout Monrovia) are always full. A man on his knees, his eyes bright with fever, is addressed with the little strength he has left to a woman at the side of the net, "Help me, let me in '.

The woman is white, has reddish blond hair protruding from under the bonnet, and the agony in his clear eyes under the mask. He answers: "I'm sorry, have to go back tomorrow." He whispers: "Tomorrow will be too late for me." Then slumps.

"Unfortunately, we have no choice," she says Ruggero Giuliani, Bolognese doctor, a volunteer at the center. "But having to dismiss a patient is devastating, as denying the foundation of our profession." In Monrovia, meanwhile, are coming three thousand American soldiers sent by President Obama with the task of building a new care center. "But is not that of soldiers we need: we need volunteers, doctors and paramedics. Without them, a new center is useless. "Only doctors and paramedics, frightened by the all too real possibility of becoming infected - it happened last week in French nurse - are not. And those few that are, for how things are likely to get, will never be enough. Thus, patients return home to die in silence, or go out there with highway traffic continues to flow, and the last thing you see are two figures in blue overalls and yellow mask that fix them unarmed through a gate that they could not open. It is not the simple death of a human being with him every time he dies the dignity of all of us. And a part of our soul burns and mingles with the smoke that is lost in the sky, on the vertical of the Hindu crematorium.

Posted on 17/10/2014