One Doctor's Campaign To Pay Those Who Risked Their Lives
As the Ebola crisis raged in West Africa last year, Dr. Nahid Bhadelia of Boston University traveled to Sierra Leone several times. Together with many other American doctors, she served alongside local health workers in the city of Kenema.
This spring, back in the U.S., she learned something upsetting: Many of the local health workers in Kenema — people who had risked their lives on the front lines of Ebola treatment units — hadn't been paid for months.
So, Bhadelia took matters into her own hands — and started raising money for them on a GoFundMe page. Her goal is to raise $50,000. As she tells NPR's Arun Rath, she has decided to give money to health workers as it comes in.
Listen to the full interview at the audio link above, and find more of Dr. Bhadelia's story below.
Nurse Issa French with his wife Anita, who's holding a copy of Time magazine's issue devoted to front-line workers. He's earned that title, treating more than 420 Ebola patients.
It was a gift of about $600, to make up for wages that weren't paid. A gesture of gratitude, it may be the encouragement embattled nurses need to continue working with the specter of Ebola ever-present.
In the darkest hours, bonds formed between Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease doctor from Boston University who volunteered to fight Ebola last year, and the West African nurses who cared for patients beside her.
Bhadelia's local partners often went without the pay they were due during the outbreak, and Bhadelia felt a growing urge to support them after she returned to the U.S. Last month, she launched a crowdfund site to send her Sierra Leonean colleagues cash.
Their bond began in late August 2014, when Bhadelia arrived at Kenema Government Hospital in eastern Sierra Leone, as part of a team organized by the World Health Organization. By then, Ebola had killed hundreds of people, including West Africa's only Ebola expert, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, who headed the hospital's Ebola ward. His team labored on, often without decent protective gear and the "hazard pay" they had been promised for the dangerous work.
Bhadelia was inspired by their bravery — and they, by her. One afternoon, Bhadelia shook with a wave of panic as she struggled to insert an intravenous line of fluid into a child in the throes of Ebola, while another child died beside her. A nurse in the ward, Issa French, gripped her arm, and steadied her. French later recalled, "When I realized what a sacrifice Dr. Nadia had made to come here and help us, I knew that I needed to keep working."
French and Bhadelia share other memories: They remember a girl — perhaps five years old — who had been found in an abandoned home beside a corpse that tested positive for Ebola. The child tested positive too. When Bhadelia made her rounds in the ward, the girl trailed behind her. In between shifts, Bhadelia, French and other nurses talked about the charming child. If she survived, they agreed Bhadelia might try to adopt her. But the girl died.
Nurse Isata Kallon outside of the triage tent.
I met French and other Kenema Hospital staff in December, long after Bhadelia had returned home. When some of the health workers told me how they toiled without pay, I spent another month in Sierra Leone — February — trying to figure out why. In an investigative feature in Newsweek, I revealed that part of the issue was inherent to the underfunded health system, and part was due to how little Ebola money had been earmarked for staff in public hospitals and clinics in the first place: less than 2 percent of $3.3 billion dollars donated from rich countries.
Rather than wait for justice, Bhadelia distributed a total of $4,300 in cash to eight of her colleagues in Kenema in July. Most received $600 — equal to several weeks of "hazard pay." As she raises more money on the site, she'll continue the support.
French, who has treated more than 420 Ebola patients, used the money to rent a new apartment on a hillside for his family. His former one-room flat was located beside a river that flooded the house in the rainy season.
Helena MacCarthy outside of the break room — in a tin hut — for nurses working at the Ebola isolation unit.
Likewise, nurse Helena MacCarthy put her allotment toward a house under construction since 2013 (in Sierra Leone, houses are built by bricklayers bit by bit as the money trickles in). Currently, she shares a two-room structure with her mother and four children. MacCarthy brimmed with pride and anticipation as she gave me a tour of the bigger spot, including a small garden she's beginning that has corn, cassava and a young palm oil tree. The house still needs work, but the walls and roof are in place.
Meanwhile, Zainab Kanneh, a 24-year-old nurse who had toiled at the hospital during her pregnancy, put the money toward a wedding to celebrate her marriage to the father of her baby boy. Another nurse told me she would give some of her money to the orphaned son of a fellow nurse at the hospital who succumbed to Ebola last year. One nurse bought a dress, shoes, and gifts for her family for Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday at the end of Ramadan.
Ambulance driver Christopher White invested in a small business: He bought a motorcycle to rent out to motorcycle taxi drivers — a more common mode of transportation in Kenema than cars. His friend at the hospital, who bravely prepared Ebola-infected corpses for burial in the morgue throughout the outbreak, made a related move. He's given up hope of a position on payroll at the morgue, and put his cash toward driving school. With a license, he hopes to become a taxi driver.
Bhadelia recognizes the shortcomings of her campaign. It's unfair, only reaching a fraction of deserving staff across the nation. It will not fix Sierra Leone's broken health system. It will not alter problems with international aid. "I battled with whether it was the right thing to do," Bhadalia says. "I can't guarantee anything about what that money will be used for, and it's not sustainable. But in the end," she says, "it came down to the fact that these people are not strangers to me. We raise money for our friends and family here in the U.S. when they need it, so this is the same thing."
Freelance writer Amy Maxmen recently traveled to Sierra Leone for "The Next Outbreak," a digital collaboration of The GroundTruth Project and NOVA Next.
Tweet to Dr. Nahid Bhadelia @BhadeliaMD
Tweet to Amy Maxmen @amymaxmen
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Transcript
ARUN RATH, HOST:
As the Ebola crisis raged in West Africa last year, many America doctors went to help. Dr. Nahid Bhadelia of Boston University went to Sierra Leone several times, serving alongside local health workers in the city of Kenema. This spring back in the U.S., she learned something upsetting.
DR. NAHID BHADELIA: I ran into Amy Maxmen, who was doing a story for Newsweek on the fact that many of the healthcare workers in Sierra Leone were not getting paid despite their work in Ebola treatment units.
RATH: She found out that many of the local health workers in Kenema hadn't been paid for months. These were people who had risked their lives on the front lines of Ebola treatment units. Dr. Bhadelia took matters into her own hands and started raising money for them on the GoFundMe website. Her goal is to raise $50,000, but she decided to give money to help workers as it comes in.
BHADELIA: After thinking about it for a while, struggling about what the right thing to do was - because it is a complicated issue. You know, you don't want to create an alternative system of pay or anything along those lines. I decided that, for me, this was similar to raising money for family and friends here who are in need.
RATH: Now, so much money flowed into West Africa during the outbreak last year. Why didn't more of that get to the healthcare workers?
BHADELIA: It's been said that less than two percent of the 3.3 billion dollars that was assigned to Ebola response actually made it to national healthcare workers. And the reasons for why not are complicated. You know, they vary from corruption to actually just a lack of good administrative system. It was very hard for a lot of healthcare workers to get the money because their names got left off the list of people who had worked in these units, so simple things, you know.
RATH: Now, you've been raising money since June. You went back to Sierra Leone to distribute some of that money to the workers in July. Talk about how that went, how they responded.
BHADELIA: It was one of the hardest and most powerful things I've done in my life because the initial experience was so hard. I think we all bonded, you know, over that. And when I went back, part of what was important to me and to them was not just the money, but to actually get their stories out. You know, I heard from them over and over again, A, it's surprising to us because we feel forgotten because we your soldiers on the front line, and it seems like nobody remembers that we helped beat this epidemic. But I think what surprised them was the fact that people across the ocean opened up their purses and donated and thought of them. And I think that moved so many of them. And the second thing that I think is important to state is they all said as much as we appreciate your help, what we actually want is a job, and we want steady pay.
RATH: Obviously, you're not in position now to be able to pay everyone who deserves the money. How do you go about deciding, you know, who gets the money first?
BHADELIA: Based on who I know that I've worked with, you know. It is truly a friends and family situation. A lot of these folks were people I worked with last summer, and we're basing it on a list of healthcare workers that was validated as those that worked at Kenema over the last year so. And I'm just going down the line beyond the ones that I know personally. And as you said, I think the hardest thing for me is I can't pay everybody. And that is the worst feeling in the world. So that's why I'm hoping the $50,000 that we're trying to raise is actually based on being able to give about $600 to all of the people who are on my list that worked in Kenema.
RATH: Do think these healthcare workers will eventually receive the money they were promised from the government?
BHADELIA: They may. Unfortunately, it's actually pretty common in West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, for healthcare workers to not to be paid for many months in a row and then part of it coming through. But this group of healthcare workers was part of an epicenter in this epidemic. Fifty of them actually acquired Ebola, and 35 of them passed away.
RATH: That's an awful situation for people who had done such heroic work, but even beyond that, what does this situation mean for public health, for stopping future outbreaks?
BHADELIA: The important thing to remember here is Ebola was a litmus test for us, as a world, to determine if emerging pathogens can really shake the foundations of our health systems at the front lines. And you can't get healthcare workers to be motivated to come help you with the next epidemic if you can't pay them. Until we resolve the administrative issues, the governance issues, it will always be part of the weakness in our response to epidemic.
RATH: Dr. Nahid Bhadelia is an infectious disease doctor at Boston University. Thank you so much.
BHADELIA: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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