Q: What is your country of origin?

DB: I’m a Kenyan and I’m a nurse/midwife. I have a Bachelor’s degree in nursing, and a Master’s of public health, epidemiology. That’s the sequence that made me come to Sierra Leone.

Q: Why did you become a nurse?

DB: I grew up in a village. My family was poor, and, of course, poverty comes with a lot of childhood illnesses. Most of the time my mother could take us to the nearest dispensary. Unfortunately, my younger sister was born with cerebral palsy, and cerebral palsy has a lot of medical issues. One day you are stable; one day you’re not. I would accompany my mother to the hospital because as children living in poverty we were often falling ill.

One of the nurses was very neat, very clean, with nice, combed hair. She wore a white dress, was very organized, and gave us the best treatment. She also gave us clean water. Basically, I admired her lifestyle and the way she used to handle us. I used to tell my mother, “One day I want to be like this lady.” She was not actually a nurse. At the village level, there were nursing aides at the village level, paramedics, but that’s what inspired me to enter the medical profession.

Q: When did you first hear of Ebola?

DB: I actually studied Ebola when I was at the university, and hemorrhagic viral diseases. It was just one of the diseases, something that we had heard about; that it had occurred in Kenya and in DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Congo, Uganda. The outbreak in 2014 made me see it in a real life situation.

Q: Tell me a little bit about when you came to Sierra Leone to work with ICAP here, what the state of the Ebola outbreak was.

DB: In 2014, I was working for CDC [Centers for Disease Control] Nairobi. One day, when I opened my computer I saw jobs popping up. I thought, ah, these are things I’m qualified for on a website with International Rescue Committee. I sent my CV [curriculum vitae] immediately, and within three hours they got back to me. They said okay and quickly organized for an interview. I told them I’d been working with CDC on various projects: sentinel surveillance, infection prevention and control, amongst other projects, and with HIV [human immunodeficiency virus].

I was interviewed, and then after twenty minutes they sent me an email saying that I was successful. It was so rapid! I informed my family, there was a lot of resistance, but now that’s history.

People were being trained for three days; me, I got trained for six hours, because I already understood the concepts. The following day I went to Bo. The situation there was pathetic. Very few health personnel. People were dying, an ambulance could come with eight suspected cases.

I was in an isolation unit, where you get the people from the community. It was like a holding unit. You first do first aid treatment. You take the sample results. You take them for testing. It would take seventy-two hours before the test results came out. We would do the conservative treatments, hydration, antipyretics, antimalarials. We were giving ciprofloxacin, quantum, ORS [oral rehydration solution], normal saline, all these things, as we waited for the results. The assignment I was given was to train nurses how to don and doff, but at times I was also engaged in patient care in the isolation unit.

Once we confirmed a case as Ebola, we transferred the patient to the treatment center. But it was also an interesting experience because you saw human beings dying like houseflies. It was actually the first time I ever saw somebody bleeding from the eyes, the skin. You see, it was like a movie, because these are things you read about in the books, and you don’t imagine they can occur in human beings. And I saw them in real life.

Q: Can you talk about the relationship between nurses and the community during the rising part of Ebola?

DB: Basically, there was this myth that it was the responsibility of the nurses, that the nurses were infecting people in the community. They became victims of circumstance. At some point it reduced, because people understood what Ebola was. Remember, this was something that rapidly came into the country, killing people en masse, and the deaths were so sudden. You know, usually there are a lot of myths when certain disasters come into the country. People come with a lot of theories to explain the cause.

Q: Would you describe in your own development, and then certainly the work forced on Ebola here, and IPC, the role of gender, of women. Do you see any particular connection, or reasons of how we draw our own strength?

DB: Yes, sure. Actually, women are resilient. It doesn’t matter what comes their way, they always stand on their feet. We are also responsible. You see, as a woman, you know the physiology of labor, what you go through and the process of childbearing, unlike men. Okay? I’m not being a female chauvinist, but that is what makes us different, anyway. But yes, women played an important role, actually taking care of the children in the isolation unit. And basically, most of the people being deployed were women, because they were the nurses. We also had male nurses, but very few. Being a woman, you are professional, you are resilient, and you have what it takes to ensure somebody gets his life back and is comfortable.

Q: Is there anything, just from your own observations, that you would recommend? Lessons you learned from Ebola? Anything else that’s particularly focused on nursing?

DB: I would prefer the leadership of the country to take some affirmative action, because basically—I won’t say indiscipline, but there’s a lot of impunity in this country. People do things, and they walk away with it. Because, like in my country, you know you are conducting delivery. What are you supposed to have? Why don’t you put it—? That alone is for you to be punished, because you know once you get an infection chances are highly likely you will infect the other staff. Okay? And, again, on the national grid, if you are sick you will be admitted, and you are now costing economically. You are costing the government. How much money will be spent on you when you are sick? Less workforce, because when you are off there is nobody to replace you. We need to have some affirmative action and discipline. If you make a mistake, at least you need to be corrected for whatever you’ve done. We give hand sanitizer. Some of them carry it home. You are given cleaning materials; you don’t clean properly or use the materials for cleaning. A lot of shortcuts.

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Dolphine Buoga was interviewed for Frontline Nurses by Jennifer Dohrn on August 12, 2019 in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

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