No, My Family's Not Leaving Africa Because of Ebola
Image courtesy of Rachel Jones
Ebola is in Africa. I’m in Africa. My kids are in Africa, too. And my husband. And lots of my friends. People ask us if we are going to leave because … Ebola. But Africa is not a country and my country of residence does not have Ebola. The United States, the country we would return to,does have Ebola — not an outbreak, but it does have reported cases. When I tell that to people, I’m met with a shocked, “But, Texas is really far away from Minnesota.” To which I could respond with, “Yes. And Liberia is three times further away from Djibouti than Texas is from Minnesota.” The entire United States, Alaska included, could fit inside Africa. Three times. Africa is really big. And so far, there is no Ebola where we live.
But there are so many flights between East and West Africa. There are more flights on a daily basis between Texas and Minnesota than there are on a monthly basis between Djibouti and West Africa. In fact, there are currently zero direct flights between Djibouti and any country with a confirmed case of Ebola.
Aren’t you afraid? As people in Chicago have no reason to fear polar bear attacks, at this point, I have no reason to fear Ebola. I won’t allow fear to affect our decisions. Risk, maybe. If we were at risk, we might make a different choice.
But there is better medical care in the United States. This is true, I won’t argue. Djibouti is not prepared for an Ebola outbreak the way the U.S. is. But even this excellent American medical care allowed one case to multiply into three for a total now of 8. So is anywhere really, truly safe from it?
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Still, are you going to stay? People say this as though every expatriate living on the African continent is desperate for an excuse to leave. Of course we’re going to stay. This is where we live.
My family is not on vacation in Djibouti. These past eleven years have not been spent on traveling, they were spent at home, living in a house, working at a job, attending a school. People don’t simply pack up home and leave because something bad happens 3,000 miles away.
There was a suicide bomb in May at a popular restaurant in Djibouti and at least three died. People asked us if were going to leave.
No, we aren’t going to leave Djibouti. That is like asking someone who lives in Boston if, after the Boston marathon bombings, they were going to move to Canada. Or like asking someone in Florida if, now that there is Ebola in the southern part of the United States, they are going to move to Maine.
The restaurant bomb was horrific. The Boston marathon bombing was horrific. Ebola is horrific. And we will all take appropriate precautions and live with an increased sense of awareness. But we can’t spend our lives fleeing every potential disaster or risk. We need to live, work, go to school, run errands. We need to put down roots that enable us to counter disasters with community, to walk through darkness, and find healing in the place where we’ve been broken.
There might come a time to rip up those roots and if that time comes, we will do it. But it won’t be easy. We would be demolishing one life without knowing what the next life looks like. When plants are uprooted, especially violently, scraps are left behind, pieces of root remain and the transplanted, scarred plant struggles to heal.
I’m not trying to undermine the seriousness of the outbreak and I’m certainly not saying we’re immune or that Ebola won’t come to Djibouti. I’m making no promises about what we would do if the disease did creep in. I confess a shiver of fear when I read a Facebook message that Ebola was in Kenya, much closer to Djibouti, and felt great relief when that rumor was proven false.
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I’m just saying that fear has a way of drawing constrictive lines around the far away and the unknown and this runs its own risks (like being refused entrance to a college because the potential student is from Nigeria). When an airsick woman flying from South Africa is treated as an Ebola patient because … Africa … the worldwide fear of Ebola has pulled an ever-tightening noose around the entire continent. I’m saying let’s be careful with our assumptions and our geography, let’s not allow fear to make us blind or insensitive, and let’s consistently choose courage over fear in how and where we live, in who and how we love.
If you know someone who you think lives in a disaster zone, be it war, disease, or nature, first find out if they really do live in that disaster zone or if it is as far away as Peru from Wisconsin. Then, don’t ask if they are leaving now that life is difficult, at least don’t make that your first question. Ask how they are handling things. Ask if they need help to handle it better, if they have the resources they need. If they decide they need to leave, support that decision and understand that they aren’t moving home. They are leaving home and they are not relieved, they are grieving.
By Rachel Jones, for Babble.com
For why I refuse to let the anxiety and fear of the unknown bring me down, visit Babble.
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