LISTEN ABOVE - AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION

Being Sierra Leonean during a global health emergency, a pandemic…means living in a state of constant fear and panic. It's triggering.

For those people who've already experienced lots of cases and they've seen how this virus has really destroyed modern life and everything that they know and it should change and happen so fast. For us as Sierra Leoneans, this is something we know too well.

And so even though we have no cases of Covid19. We are terrified. I am terrified because we know what happens here. When we are in crisis, whether it's a civil war, public health crisis, and natural disaster. All of us have experienced the shocks, both personally, in our communities. And in the country as a whole. We know that devastation it's not a story that you're told about something that happened a long time ago. It's something that you've lived. It's something that your community has lived, and it's something that you've had to overcome.

We are definitely in a place where we can't afford to be complacent.

We can't afford to be lax. We just can't afford, what the world can or what the world could a couple months ago. We could not pretend that there wasn't something happening, what a lot of people don't know is that Sierra Leone set up quarantine. As far back as January, at the time it was just for people coming back from China.

And this was again because we know that it's a high stakes game. And there are no winners.

I have been trying to think about, well what message do we want to put out into the world. What can we show? What can we say? It's hard because it feels like we have a burden, as a country we have this burden to prove that we are just not this major mess…fuckup, like this place, that things just happen, every couple of years something Godforsaken happens. We're really really praying and hoping it doesn't come here. So for once, we can say see we didn't fuck that up.

We, we are here, we didn't get Corona, see, we are not a mess. But that's such a heavy burden to bear. It's such a weight. It means that already we acknowledge that we're, we're not equal, that we are less than, if you constantly feel like you have to prove yourself, you have to show yourself. It's a burden. It's a heavy load. But we still pray that we get no cases of Corona virus because a huge part of it is also about our individual and collective mental states, our mental well being.

How much more can we take as individuals and as a nation? It takes its toll I think on nation-building. If every couple of years something comes in decimates your life as you know it, the natural order of things and you got to then adjust for another shock and adjust for another shock. We don't know normalcy. We don't know tranquility and we need to, which is why the measures that have been put in place so far. For us, are not extreme. They're not extreme. 

This is how you act when you've been when you know when you're triggered, right, our actions are not extreme. These are the actions of a country, and people who know what the costs are because the cost are our lives, always lives, when you don't prepare and when you don't take action, when you see it coming and you don't plan for it when you see it coming and you don't take those early measures. When it comes to a public health emergency of this size. There really is no measure that's too extreme. As long as you're not violating the rights of people, human rights, but the most important thing is that you act.

Because when you allow a crisis like this to explode. There is a heavy price to pay.

We don't have the capacity to import thousands and thousands of face masks. We don't have the finances to order, tons and tons of tests. We don't have the hospital beds, we don't have the hospitals. We don't even have the electricity to power the hospitals, we don't have the running water. We don't have, state of the art medical facilities we don't have best in class and top medical professionals who are published with this with that, who are the best of everything we do not have any of these things. The only thing that we have is preparation. The only thing that we have is the things that in a way make coronavirus something that we could be right we have a robust decentralized public health system staffed by people, not technology, who can take motorbikes and go to villages and go to communities to do contact tracing to share public health information. 

We have people who already have experienced the worst at the frontlines with Ebola now activated to do the same for Covid19. But as a country, and as a nation, we are in a state of panic. And every day, we go to sleep and wake up we're praying to God, please pass over us, because we just don't have anymore, we don't know if we have anymore, anymore to give.

And we need a win.

And in this case, a win would be staying at zero.