For my blogpost this week, I chose to highlight Andrew Harding's article "On the frontline in Sierra Leone as Ebola virus spreads" on the BBC World News website. I chose this particular article because I have noticed that the news media has a tendency to sanitize and intellectualize statistics regarding Ebola in Africa (and more generally, in world locations beyond the United States).
In the article, Harding, BBC's Africa correspondent, visits the village of Kigbal in Sierra Leone. There he encounters hosts of children, many orphaned or having suffered the death of a close family member due to Ebola. As Harding reports, Kigbal is the epicenter of the current resurgence of Ebola in Sierra Leone.
An ominously named "burial team" patrols nearby to remove bodies lying fallow in dirt -- because entire families have been wiped out by Ebola, if not for the burial team, these bodies probably would never be attended to.
Harding also spends much of his piece interviewing community leaders, including Chief Lamina, the director of a Freetown orphanage, who express collective frustration with the lack of foreign aid available to the suffering poor in this time of dire need.
All in all, Harding's piece painting a gripping portrait of the "front lines" of Ebola and provided much-needed perspective on what is an increasingly a humanitarian and health crisis.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-29888067
--Shubha Raghvendra
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