Behind the Eclipse

by Pramudith D. Rupasinghe

  ‘George, we will apply for a loan from LBDI?’ One the way home, Aminatta suggested me.

  ‘That is what I was thinking too,’ my reply made her smile.

  Even before the Pepper bird`s symphonies started, I was up on the following day and arranged a file of all of my credentials and drafted a letter to Dr. Harris for getting his guarantee to apply for a mortgage loan.

  I made my Atae in the morning while Aminatta was still sleeping, and went outside. The city had not still awakened. The dust that flew up in the air was still dormant. Unnerving klaxon of Yellow-machines and auto taxis were silent. A mild breeze that came across the Atlantic wrapped around me when the maiden rays of the rising sun cut through the darkness that had been ruling the sky so far. It was picturesque and thought-provoking. I felt that the sunrise was like hopefulness, the darkness was about to surrender to the light of hope.

  ‘Thanks God!’

  ‘Thank you! for everything’ I did not feel that Aminatta had come and joined me.

  ‘Yes, It is Allah,’ she added.

  Under one sky, looking at the hopeful rays of the sun, keeping our feet on the rough earth, we thanked for Allah and God. When unseen superpowers divided human beings, the universe remained dumb, deaf and mute sharing all what it had among us.

  After a refreshing and hopeful morning with fresh thoughts, I got ready to go to work. Exactly at 07:45 a.m., the white colour Land-cruiser of Dr. Harris used to stop just in front of my house. It had been ritualistic since the time we moved to Sinkor.

  ‘Good morning George!’ Dr. Harris said while I was getting into the Jeep.

  ‘Good morning Sir! How the body Sir?’ I asked as he was very much used to the Liberian way of asking ‘how are you.’

  ‘Hm, not good news from Guinea,’ he replied with a serious tone.

  ‘What happened? Any problems in the mission?’ I could not imagine anything beyond the mission in Conakry.

  ‘Nothing wrong with the mission. It is more serious than …’ He swallowed what he was about to tell.

  ‘Sir. Are you all right?’ I could not but ask as I noticed that he was worried.

  ‘I am ok George,’ he said and kept silent for a while.

  ‘There is an Ebola outbreak in Guinea, looks like beyond control already. The mission called me last night.’

  ‘Ebola?’ What is that?

  ‘It’s a haemorrhagic fever like Lassa fever but more contagious than that,’ his explanation triggered my memories of childhood. I did not want to hear about that tragedy that eradicated several villages including mine usurping my loved ones from me, making me an orphan. I felt as if a thunder strike hit on my head.

  ‘No way,’ I said.

  ‘It is in Gueckedou, near Liberian border, a few kilometres away,’

  ‘Sir,’ I could not tell anything anymore. I felt as if the history was about to repeat.

  28

  ‘Sir, I am planning to put up a house on the piece of land we bought,’ I told Dr. Harris while he was walking into the office.

  ‘What a good decision. You do not need to pay rents.’ He said with delight.

  ‘Yes, and we will have our own house,’ I said proudly.

  ‘In case you need any help, please do not hesitate to let me know,’ he added opening the door to his glass cubical.

  ‘Sir I need a guarantee letter about my Job to apply for a loan at LBDI bank,’ I sounded hesitant.

  ‘Sure, George, it’s a peanut,’ he smiled.

  During the lunch break, Dr. Harris called me to his cabinet. It was not more than fifty steps from my desk to his cabinet, but I felt as if I was walking along a pathway that did not have an end.

  ‘You are full of sweat, what were you doing George?’ Dr. Harris looked surprised.

  I could not respond to his question as I was waiting for an answer from him which was life -changing for my family and me.

  ‘Here is your letter,’ he gave me a white envelope.

  ‘All the very best for your plans,’ he added with a smile.

  A current of happiness suddenly ran through all my veins.

  ‘Thank you, Sir, God bless you!’

  ‘Thank you, Sir!’

  ‘Thank you very much, Sir!’

  I thanked him several times since it was the only thing left in my hand to give him for the moment. He kept on looking at me with a verbally unexpressed happiness clearly manifested in his eyes.

  ‘George, use money carefully and for your purpose,’ he smiled again and turned his head towards the computer screen.

  I received the loan four weeks after the submission of the application and I went to inform Dr. Harris that my dream had almost come true. I tapped on the glass door a couple of times, but he did neither hear it nor notice the presence of me in his cabin.

  ‘Sir,’ I said a little louder.

  ‘Oh George,’ he startled.

  ‘Sir, are you ok?’ I asked politely, as I noticed the puzzling expression on his face.

  ‘You managed to get the loan?’ He asked with a fake smile which I had never seen on his face.

  ‘Congratulations George,’ Dr. Harris added before I replied.

  ‘Shall I sit Sir?’ I asked. He showed the chair but did not say anything. He was silent for a few seconds and said, ‘You know Ebola has already taken several lives in Guinea.’

  I fell pensive for a few seconds, and I could not say anything but hear my heart beat. What happened to my Kissi village became visible inside my inward eye; the way people died in the village of Oldman`s brother, how my father suffered, all came to my mind in an instant.

  ‘We might be called back to Guinea as it looks like the mission in Guinea needs more medical and paramedical staff to be deployed in newly established ETU,’ he looked serious and sad.

  ‘People are dying in the villages and no local clinics, and small hospitals can manage it.’ I knew very well how basic the hospitals and the village dispensaries were in Guinea, and there were literary no facilities except a couple of old metal beds with cotton mats full of bed bugs and a few boxes of malaria tablets and basic medicine for mild external wounds.

  ‘I will follow you,’ I said instantly but did not know whether I really wanted to go to a place where the Bush-curse had crept in. The mental images of the calamity I witnessed in my childhood in Lofa remained engraved in my mind, and I was sure they would never erase from my mind till my death.

  ‘A team from the headquarter will come next week to train all the staff on working in Ebola prevalent areas, and there will be a special pre-deployment training for the volunteers who would express their motivation to work in Ebola response in Guinea,’

  ‘You know George; this is serious, but as human beings, we can’t escape. We have to do something about it,’ he said firmly yet he looked troubled. He always had the humanitarian imperative in the forefront and his sensitivity to human suffering was exceptionally high, unlike many aid workers who came to Africa to spend their paid exotic holiday somewhere in Africa.

  Dr. Harris`s human kindness was not new to me but his feeling of being obligated to do something even at a personal level to alleviate sufferings of the others inspired me a lot. His response to the news of Ebola outbreak in Guinea stimulated my thoughts.

  I had never heard about Ebola. But according to what Dr. Harris explained to me, there was no difference between the Bush-curse and Ebola which made me believe that it was nothing but the Bush-curse that the white man had given a new name just like they did with the Creator of the African tribal belief system. Just like God, Ebola should be a new name introduced by the White man, who found many new things in Africa to which he did not have native names. I felt that I should talk about my experience when I was young since it looked like the same thing that Dr. Harris was talking about.

  It was during the first workshop on Ebola vi
rus disease, and I disclosed my childhood experience in the bush.

  ‘We had the same thing years ago, it was the 1960s if I am not wrong,’ I started.

  ‘Where?’ The facilitator from Italy, a wrinkled faced lady, looked at me reminding me of a cruel old wizard.

  ‘You …. Say…. Ebola was here?’ She sounded threatened.

  ‘I said, when I was small, we had a disease that brought death to entire villages and whosoever had contacts with the sick or the dead started falling sick approximately after one week. They had red eyes, looked weak, shivering, diarrhoea, fever, and finally, they died bleeding from everywhere and some of them turned out to be devilish as their skin was full of bubbles and wounds.’ I explained what I witnessed in the village of Oldman`s brother and the last few days of my father.

  ‘You are mistaken, there are no such records that there had been Ebola in Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leon before. There was one case reported in Ivory Coast, and it was a scientist from abroad who had done researches with monkeys. Besides that, the very first known case was from Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1976 and there were a few outbreaks occurred in Zaire, Uganda, and Sudan. Otherwise, we do not have records of Ebola cases in Liberia,’ she kept on explaining in a very defensive tone rather than trying to open a space for us to discuss. I felt that she was rather trying to intimidate me than allow me to share my experience.

  At the same time, my colleagues-specially fellow Liberians did not want to accept what I was telling. They were in complete denial that there had been no Ebola in Liberia before and they took my attempt as an offence which would potentially let down the country. Accepting that there was a killer disease before in this land was not an insult but an opportunity to discover traditional community-based disease management strategies which were used by our ancestors and, to mix them with modern science to find better ways to respond to such fast-spreading diseases.

  ‘Madam, records are in your books, but I remember what exactly happened in my community which was just the next door to the place where the epidemic broke out in Guinea. Apart from that, there was no one from your part of the world to record what was happening in thick tropical forests in West Africa. We did not use your language to name sicknesses and problems that we went through in the bush. I was trying to make a point that there was an epidemic which was more or less the same in symptoms, onset, and transmission during my childhood. The whole village of My grandfather`s brother succumbed. Then my father who went to support the healer, fell sick upon arrival to our village and more than four-fifths of our village died because of it. I survived as I did not have contacts with anyone and I met with an accident in the bush while I was searching medication for my sick father and lost my way back,’ I went on explaining loud articulating every single word so that everyone in the hall could hear loud and clear. Also, I maintained the politeness throughout as my purpose was not to defend against the lady but to let everyone know that Ebola could be a new name but not a new decease to my region.

  ‘George, you are not a doctor or scientist,’ one of my colleagues said, and the others laughed loud. I felt that my own people feared to believe the existence of Ebola in the region. People would love to hear the echoes of what they believe in and words that please them, but they often fear to admit the fall of their belief and bitterness of reality. Instead, they try to mobilise their psychic energy to defend what they believe in or please them which is merely an act of trying to hide behind a rainbow knowing that there will be pouring rains.

  ‘There was no Ebola here o,’ one colleague said while leaving the hall after the workshop.

  ‘This country Good, no sickness,’ another said.

  ‘Thanks God, No Ebola here,’

  ‘No sickness here,’

  I was the only one who had a different view, but I believed it more than what others said even though the number of voices suppressed my opinion.

  ‘When more and more people start voicing against you, it is time for you to realise that you had just said something important.’ The words of Oldman were indubitably right.

  29

  Noticing that I was entering the room, Aminatta started to cry hysterically and fell on the ground just like a tree caught in a cyclone.

  ‘Oh Camilla,’

  ‘Oh Camilla.’

  ‘How?’ Her cry had already convinced me that Camilla was no more, but I did not know how it happened because she visited us two weeks ago asking for some money to visit Maliandou to attend a funeral of one of her close relatives.

  ‘God knows,’

  ‘She bled and dead,’

  ‘Camilla dead o,’

  A nerve-wracking sensation rushed through my whole body immediately after I heard what she said.

  ‘Ebola?’ I could not believe that it had crossed the border though I was anticipating cases across the border sooner or later.

  ‘Bush-curse, save us, God!’ I did not know what else to say. My mental pictures of the Bush-curse in Kissi village in Lofa started flicking inside my mind making me convinced that an unavoidable catastrophe was making its way towards our lives.

  ‘Where had she been when she died?’ I asked Aminatta though she was not still in the right mood to talk.

  ‘Lofa, her friend`s place,’

  ‘When the Bush-curse enters the village, you do not touch the body. The curse comes out from the dead person because it can’t be living in a dead body, and waits till someone touches it to enter into that person`s body,’ it was Oldman who was relating on a thriller story about the Bush-curse. According to what he said, there had been an outbreak of the Bush-curse during his childhood as well. Even though he did not know his age in years; he used to refer his age to ‘Not a long time after the second outbreak of the Bush-curse within ten full moons,’ which was an evidence that there had been an epidemic of the Bush-curse which I believed what was now known as Ebola, even during the childhood of my grandfather. Then, I witnessed one outbreak five decades ago and what was happening in Guinea looked like the third one known to me. I could not free my mind from the belief that it was the same Bush-curse that people called Ebola and, for sure, many among the old generation, especially, those who were from Kissi villages should have at least a slight recollection of the symptoms and behaviour of the Bush-curse.

  ‘You are not going to the funeral,’ I said to Aminatta knowing that her reaction would rather be of emotions just like most of the people in my society.

  ‘My best friend o,’ her cry turned louder and aggressive.

  ‘You say I should not go?’

  ‘My man I go,’

  ‘I go,’

  ‘You rude. I go,’

  I had to make her understand in the African way. I gave her a thundering slap across her fleshy cheeks that were already wet with tears. The blasting sound of the slap brought her back to consciousness. Her cry turned into a quarrel with me which opened some space for us to talk even though it was aggression.

  ‘I say you do not go her funeral,’ my words were well articulated and loud enough.

  ‘I know this is Bush-curse, you do not go there and die,’

  Her rueful laughter was an indication that she did not believe what I told. She did not want to hear what I was telling. For her, I was a bad man who was trying to prevent his wife from participating in her best friend`s funeral. But for me, I recognised how much they were attached to each other as best friends from their very childhood, but she was dead caused by a highly contagious disease which I did not want my wife to contract and face the most unfortunate fate one could embrace by mistake and ignorance.

  ‘If you walk out of this house, I will take my children and walk away,’ I threatened shaking her by holding hard from her shoulders. Then I walked away from the house with mixed feelings.

  That night, I did not want to go home till late. I drank a couple of Club-beers and went home
early morning. Before I kicked the door, it opened. It was Princess waiting till her father returned home. It was a shock for her to see her father coming home drunk who was barely able to stand straight.

  ‘Where your mother,’ Princess could not find words to answer me. She showed me Aminatta on the floor sleeping.

  ‘Well. Ask her to sleep as much as she wants, but she is not going anywhere!’ I said again. And six little eyes were focused on me just like little racoons looking at an eagle flying low upon their den.

  I could not see Aminatta leaving my life untimely. I could not imagine our children to become orphans. My worry was rather about losing the woman with whom I was able to establish an emotional bond after Kumba than me being a widower. We had just started walking along the paths of our dreams, and I would not let all of those thoughts keep me up the whole night.

  ‘Aminatta, it is Bush-curse, that is what usurped my whole family from me.’ I could not resist my tears.

  It was sagacious that I prevented Aminatta from going to the funeral because two family members of the deceased friend, including her civil husband, passed away in following two weeks’ time making Aminatta realise the seriousness of what I told her.

  ‘We got to be careful now,’ she was concerned about the children.

  ‘Yes, we have to make sure we put up at least one room and move to our land,’ she was right. All five of us lived in the same room I rented a few years ago. There were a couple of other families living in other rooms of the old house which once belonged to an American man who worked as a miner. In the mornings, the bathroom became a public toilet, and in the evenings, the kitchen became a community kitchen, and privacy and hygiene were limited merely to words.

  It was a miracle that the loan was approved quicker than I expected, and we hurriedly got two rooms, the bathroom and a kitchen area done. Even though we did not have electricity or running water, we moved to the house which was not even plastered. There was no money left for cementing the floor, but I was more than contented to have my family separated from close communities and share the living space.