Worldcrunch.com / LE MONDE
FORÉCARIAH — Assény Touré’s tightly drawn features bear testament to his harrowing ordeal. In December, after he was diagnosed with Ebola, this taciturn 30-year-old was chased out of the village where he was born, Béta, an hour-drive away from Forécariah, in western Guinea. The virus killed 19 members of his family. He survived. And yet he's still a pariah.
“Ebola killed my family," says Touré, who has taken up shelter in a Red Cross tent where four patients are being quarantined. "I won’t let other Guineans die of that disease."
Now cured, Touré is trying to raise awareness in this town where Ebola leaves people either angry or indifferent. The epidemic, which moved from the forest in the northeast to the coast, is still ravaging the region even as it is finally being contained in the rest of the country. Nearly 3,600 cases have been confirmed in Guinea since December 2013. More than 2,300 people have died.
With Liberia and Sierra Leone farther along in the recovery from Ebola, the Guinean authorities are still hoping to announce the end of the epidemic before the end of May. Only nine cases were reported last week, the lowest number since the epidemic started. But they fear that Forécariah, the last active center, might contaminate the capital Conakry and the towns in between.
“We’re a kind of shield to prevent Ebola from spreading to the capital,” says Emmanuel Pajot, operations coordinator at the Red Cross Ebola Treatment Center, set up at the end of an alley in ochre earth. “The goal is to do as much as possible before the rainy season because some remote areas are already difficult to reach.”
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