Inside Geneva Summer profile: tackling Ebola in DRC

What makes someone run towards a disaster like Ebola, rather than away from it? That’s one of the things I ask Trish Newport, a nurse with MSF Switzerland, who is currently in Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, tackling the current outbreak.

Swissinfo’s Inside Geneva podcast is beginning its regular season of summer profiles, and this week, Trish Newport is our first guest. She took the time to join us, despite the huge workload she faces, and the difficulty getting a stable connection to have our conversation.

Before we talked about Ebola, I wanted to know why Trish had chosen this particular career. Had she always wanted to be a nurse? In fact, ever since childhood, her ambitions were even more specific than that.

“My grandma was a humanitarian,” she told me. “She had worked in Malawi, and I remember when I was about ten years old she said to me, ‘when you grow up and you become a humanitarian you should work for Médecins Sans Frontières, because they really have strong values and ethics that you will appreciate.’”

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Trish was convinced this was the future for her, and although she had other experiences along the way (including spending several years in a tent in Canada’s Yukon region, which is where she is from), she never deviated from it. She contacted MSF as soon as she began her nursing training, and joined them as soon as she could.

Fastest outbreak on record

The World Health Organization (WHO) says this is the fastest spreading Ebola outbreak ever – and it’s compounded by security and funding challenges. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo are displaced because of conflict, they lack clean water, sanitation, proper shelter, let alone adequate healthcare.

Trish is no stranger to Ebola, she worked in a previous DRC outbreak in 2018, and she does not underestimate the challenges this time. “It’s not just an Ebola outbreak.” she told Inside Geneva.  “It’s an Ebola outbreak in a context with massive humanitarian needs, that has high insecurity, there’s ongoing conflict.”

That means, she explained, that the usual rigorous protocols for getting Ebola under control are virtually impossible. “We see the outbreak is starting to go into areas with high insecurity, where we hear about community deaths, but we don’t have access to them, to actually sample to see if it’s Ebola or not, or to have a proper Ebola response.”

Despite the challenges, Trish has an almost astonishing enthusiasm for the work she is doing. She admits to being “fascinated” by a disease which is so deadly, but yet can be defeated, and lives saved, as long strict measures are taken. And she is delighted to rejoin the communities she got to know in DRC during her last posting, telling me “I feel like I’ve come home to see the family.”

Tension and suspicion

But trust from communities who need support to fight Ebola is not automatic. Big international aid agencies have made mistakes in the past, parachuting in with their expensive equipment, their rules and, sometimes, a “we know best” attitude, without taking account of local wishes and traditions.

Washing the body is an important part of the funeral ritual in many parts of DRC, but Ebola makes this particularly dangerous, because the disease is spread via bodily fluids. Finding the right way to discuss this with grieving communities, and developing safe burial practices with them, rather than for them, is key.

MSF knows these challenges all too well. In May, when the outbreak was clearly spreading, medical tents belonging to MSF were set on fire in Mongwbalu, a mining town in DRC, after angry crowds attempted to retrieve the body of a young local man.

Trish recalls being “so proud of my team”, who stayed, engaged with the community, and found a way to work together to ensure safe burials, bringing in local leaders not just to defuse tension, but to collaborate on strategies.

Multiple challenges

But the resentment towards aid agencies comes not just from their perceived insensitivity towards local communities. It also stems from the complex humanitarian challenges DRC has faced for years, which, increasingly, traditional donors do not seem to be interested in.

Trish recalls trying to engage a local leader in the fight against Ebola only to be told: “Ebola is your priority. It’s not our priority. We don’t have access to clean water…children die of malaria because they don’t have access to treatment. And then you guys come in with all of your money because you only care about Ebola.”

That frustration is compounded because donor countries, such as the United States, or in Europe, have been cutting their humanitarian funding. Now that there is another Ebola outbreak, some cash is coming back, but it is earmarked – it can only be spent on Ebola, not on tackling other things like malaria.

In the last 18 months, Trish and her MSF colleagues have seen a number of humanitarian agencies leave the region of DRC where Ebola has taken hold. That means there is less capacity on the ground even for the basic task of noticing that people are becoming ill, let alone treating them.

While it is hard to make a direct correlation between the funding cuts and the severity of this outbreak, Trish is sure of one thing, “the response is not big enough, there’s not enough beds for patients, there’s not enough funding, there’s not enough international support.”

She agrees with the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that this outbreak is by no means under control. There were already hundreds of cases before the outbreak was even declared, she points out, “It was massive. And so we’ve never ever caught up to it.”

So what would Trish say to people living in wealthy countries, who believe Ebola is a problem they need not fret about? “People here, they’re people,” she tells me. “They’re humans.”

“It just breaks your heart. These are people who have dealt with so much trauma. And we’re all humans, and so I have a hard time understanding why we can’t connect that way.”

Listen to the whole interview on the Inside Geneva podcast – and stay tuned for future summer profiles, where we will be profiling an aid worker currently tasked with keeping the Geneva Conventions relevant in 21^st century warfare, and, in a way, profiling one of the most recognisable, iconic symbols in the world – the red cross emblem itself.

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