on ebola and going to nigeria anyway

The form I had to fill out upon leaving Lomé, Togo headed for 

Abuja, Nigeria. Except no one collected it when I arrived, 

despite how official it looks. They did take my temperature though.

In a manner of speaking, this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered Ebola during my international travels, so that’s partly why it hasn’t phased me too much to come to Lagos despite the news reports and despite the concerns of people who care about me (now, if I’d been slated to travel to the epicenters of Guinea, Liberia, or Sierra Leone, I would have reconsidered my plans, to be sure).

In 2007, just about two months after I left Uganda, one of the communities I visited there was hit by an Ebola outbreak. Doctors I had recently met were at the epicenter of fighting the disease. They stayed in the community to do battle while their children and coworkers were evacuated. I followed the doctors’ blog posts and prayed with them. A Ugandan doctor friend of the American doctors I spent time with—a man they had called their best friend and someone they highly respected—was one of the victims of the virus. Ebola is a disease that attacks a community’s most dedicated servants.

Thus, for me, for years now, Ebola has been more than a horrifying plot device from the movies. It’s been a real life reality that touched people and places I know. But sometimes reality actually makes a thing less scary. There are ways to contain Ebola and ways to avoid it. The challenge is a challenge of community health and education and getting people to abide by those containment measures and providing appropriate medical supplies. Reality doesn’t take away risk, but it does make clear that Ebola is something that can be fought and defeated. (Here the Doctors Myhre comment on the current Ebola outbreak.)