Some victims swarmed the hospitals, while others ran away in panic as nurses fell ill all around them. Even the rebels were spooked; the LRA released 40 prisoners, fearing that they might be carrying the virus.
When the trucks pull into Akwayugi, villagers look up from sifting maize and wheat. This isn’t as bad as Sub-Saharan Africa gets, but there’s serious squalor here. About a fifth of the children have the bulging bellies that indicate severe malnutrition.
The Red Cross volunteers divide into four-person teams and move through the village, asking questions of the small crowds that gather wherever they go: Did anyone have a fever? Did anyone have bloody diarrhea or vomit? Was there a sudden death?
The team has a “reintegration kit” for two girls who survived Ebola after they lost their mother to the disease. They find them with their father, Charles Odongo, outside the family’s round, mud-brick hut. Two weeks earlier, Odongo returned from the fields to find his wife in the hut with a headache and high fever. “It took six hours for the ambulance to get here,” he says. “And by the time they arrived, she had died.” When he sees the kit—cooking pots, blankets, soap, salt, and clothing—he smiles gratefully. “Immediately upon leaving for the hospital with my wife’s body, our things were burned by the neighbors,” he says.
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