Remember that time when you couldn’t go to a party because you had an essay you hadn’t written? Or that time when you’d overspent during the week, and banned yourself from leaving the house all weekend? It’s definitely happened to me, they were not very fun times.
Imagine then, if your national government banned you from partying for an entire year. Oh, and you’re not allowed to even have a public gathering with your friends. On the plus side, I guess you’d do pretty well at school. Nope, your school is closed for the next nine months, too. You’re just going to have to sit and wait for life to start happening again, and hope for the best.
For us, this is an odd hypothetical scenario, but it’s been the reality in Sierra Leone for the past year. As Ebola ripped through parts of West Africa in the second half of 2014, normal life was no longer possible. In an attempt to control the pandemic, the government created emergency laws that banned sporting events, closed nightclubs, closed schools, and forced restaurants to close by 9pm. It was a drastic response to a drastic problem, and a lot of people’s lives were on hold for an indefinite period of time.
Over the following months, a major international effort was underway to get Ebola cases down to zero. Through public health education, purpose-built clinics, and the tireless efforts of both local and international health workers, the number of people catching the virus started to decline. Although there are only two positive Ebola cases in the country as I write this, the virus has claimed 3,585 lives in Sierra Leone since the first case was reported in May 2014.
This fantastic progress is what prompted Sierra Leonean President Ernest Bai Koroma to lift the ban on public gatherings last Friday. And just like my 19 year old self after I finally got around to writing that essay I’d been avoiding, many of the locals in the capital Freetown knew that it was time to celebrate long into the night. This is a part of the world that needs very little excuse to laugh and dance, so even after 12 months of not practicing, their party skills were still sharp.
Beach football, makeshift outdoor cinemas, nightclubbing, beach bars, a lengthy evening at a restaurant table… it was all happening in Sierra Leone. 21 year old Freetown local Adonis Assaf was spotted having an evening beach stroll, and told The Guardian newspaper “I feel great, I feel like I was locked up in a cage for the past year. It’s so nice to be out”. But it’s more than the pleasure of a good beach stroll, because after a year out of school, Adonis can finally get back into it and resume his law studies.
But while the removal of the ban on public gatherings is a great sign of progress, the nation is well aware that the work is not done. For as long as there remains a single case of Ebola in a place, there’s the risk that it could once again break out. 10 of Sierra Leone’s 14 districts have been Ebola-free for the past 100 days, and efforts are ongoing in the north of the country to reach zero nation-wide.
Life has been severely disrupted in Sierra Leone, and it’s going to take years to bounce back from the mental trauma, lost productivity, lost education, and the expense of battling the Ebola outbreak. But thanks to the united global response over the past 12 months, weekends in Freetown are back to feeling free!