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 Scientists traced the source of the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola to
two-year-old Emile Ouamouno, who they believe contracted the disease
while playing near the tree, home to hundreds of bats that may have
been hosting the deadly virus.
The boy's father, Etienne Ouamouno, said Emile fell ill in December
2013, and infected his sister and mother who was eight months
pregnant at the time. Over a year later, having lost all his
immediate family, Etienne Ouamouno has difficulty in finding words
to describe his grief.
For now, his body language does the talking.
Sitting at the foot of the kapok tree, which has since been set
alight by the villagers to smoke out all the bats, Ouamouno
nervously lights up a cigarette and takes a number of short drags in
quick succession before flicking off the ash.
There is a long, uncomfortable silence as he contemplates the
significance of this spot. Almost 24,000 people mainly in
hardest-hit Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, have been infected and
some 9,700 have died from Ebola as a result of the chain of
transmission that started here.
"It wasn't Emile that started it," Ouamouno finally says in Kissi,
the local language. "Emile was too young to eat bats, and he was too
small to be playing in the bush all on his own. He was always with
his mother."
NO INCOME
For Ouamouno and thousands of others in the forest region of
southeastern Guinea, once the breadbasket of the West African
nation, the suffering has only deepened. Ebola has left them scared,
frustrated and jobless.
"There's food on the market, but not enough money to buy it. Around
100,000 people are out of work since the mining companies closed due
to Ebola," said Jean-Luc Siblot, emergency coordinator for the World
Food Programme (WFP) in Guinea.
"Closures of borders with Ivory Coast, Liberia and Mali and the lack
of willingness for food transporters to come into the region meant
agricultural collectives were stuck with their products," Siblot
told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Jobs have dried up in 91 percent of the communities surveyed by WFP
in the forest region. Farmers in other parts of the country say up
to 50 percent of their crop has spoiled because they could not be
sold across borders.
WFP estimates that up to 1 million people do not get three meals a
day and many have to sell their assets to buy food. Ebola has made
this worse.
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Since September, WFP has distributed over 15,000 tonnes of food aid
to around 550,000 people in the forest region, including the
prefectures of Macenta, Gueckedou and Kissidougou, where the
outbreak was the most ferocious.
MARSHALL PLAN
In the dense undergrowth around Meliandou, children pick mushrooms
for dinner while their mothers make palm oil in the village
courtyard. But palm oil alone will not feed the family, nor will it
sell for enough to put food on the table.
"What we need right now is agricultural support. We need more
classrooms, a church, and health posts staffed with doctors and
equipped with medicine," said Ouamouno, who started to open up with
the encouragement of the village chief.
In January, global aid agency Oxfam called for a multi-million
dollar post-Ebola "Marshall Plan" to help Guinea, Sierra Leone and
Liberia -- similar to a U.S. aid program to help rebuild shattered
European economies after World War Two.
The idea was revived on Tuesday as the leaders of the countries met
international donors in Brussels to discuss their response to Ebola.
Back in Meliandou, villagers were skeptical of the government's
intentions ahead of presidential elections due later this year.
"The government has never done anything for us in the past, so why
would they change now," said Ouamouno, reflecting the view of many
in this largely anti-government region of the country.
(Reporting by Misha Hussain; Editing by Katie Nguyen)
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