THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Someone needs to make room in the dictionary for the efforts of health workers in West Africa to be included as a definition of compassion and bravery and humanity, among their other qualities.

Birte Abild soaked a diaper in chlorine to wash a 5-year-old boy dying of Ebola. Then she held him close.

“I wrapped him in a big towel, and for a short while I held him,” said the Swedish nurse, who has been working in Sierra Leone for just over a month. “I sang a children’s song for him, and I knew he would die, but I had to go out. The next time I saw him, he was dead. He was alone.”

Abild has been a nurse for 34 years. She traveled to Kenema, in eastern Sierra Leone, to work with the International Federation for the Red Cross (IFRC), which opened the Kenema facility in mid-September. She knew how difficult treating Ebola patients would be, but that doesn’t make her job any easier.

“It’s hard to see people dying alone and that you can’t give more,” she said....

While international staff members rotate through Sierra Leone’s clinics frequently, local health care workers are watching their country deteriorate in the face of the hemorrhagic fever.

As patients’ conditions worsen, they vomit, have diarrhea and sometimes bleed internally and externally, releasing contagious fluids. Amara Augustine, an infection prevention and control worker from Sierra Leone, has the grueling task of cleaning up bodily fluids.

He knew he was taking on a colossal risk but felt compelled to help anyway.

“People are dying every day, and I thought it fit I should save my people at this crucial moment,” he said...

Though he’s proud of his work, many people who are associated with Ebola — even health care workers — are stigmatized in Sierra Leone.

“My family has abandoned me — and my friends — because I’m doing this job. I’m alone,” Augustine said. “But I have decided to help my country, my people. I feel I am doing the right job. I was sad at first to their reactions, but at the same time, patients here are being discharged. Some are getting better, so it’s worth it.”...

Veronica Bull has been a nurse for three years and arrived from the country’s capital, Freetown, to work in Kenema. She admits she was scared at first to work with Ebola patients but has quickly grown comfortable and enjoys helping her country.

“I urge other nurses to come, she said. “You cannot sit with your arms folded when you’re a nurse and while people are dying from sickness.”

Compare these people to the assholes trying to scare the shit out of you and ask yourself, "Where the Fuck did we go wrong?"