This Might Be The Worst Job At An Ebola Clinic
Oct 20, 2014, 19:27 IST
When he arrived in Liberia, West Africa, Pierre Trbovic began by helping to treat the sick - people who were powerless to move, much less eat or drink, young children who cried in pain. But within days, the situation began to deteriorate. There were too many sick, and far too few beds. Doctors barely had room to move among the endless rows of patients.
Then the line for the clinic reached the street. Heavy rains came, but still the line grew longer.
That's when Trbovic, a Belgian anthropologist working with Doctors Without Borders to contain Ebola, volunteered for a terrible task: turning sick people away at the door.
"This wasn't a job that we planned for anyone to do, but somebody had to do it," he wrote in a post on the Doctors Without Borders website.
The first person Trbovic turned away was a father who'd brought his sick daughter to the clinic. "He was an educated man, and he pleaded with me to take his teenage daughter, saying that while he knew we couldn't save her life, at least we could save the rest of his family from her," Trbovic wrote.