Working at the Car Wash

There have been some unanticipated challenges to the fieldwork as planned.  (Aren’t there always?).  Our plan was to meet with people working in the response for various agencies, but also to do a number of open-ended interviews with regular people about whether they’d received the Ebola messages, whose messages they trust, and what behaviors they’d changed.  As a fluent Krio speaker, in the past I have found it pretty easy to strike up conversations with people on the street.  We start with an explanation of why I speak Krio so well, I then ask whether they have time for me to ask them a few quick questions, and 95% of the time people are more than happy to talk to me quite openly and enthusiastically.

What we didn’t anticipate was that the city would be on lock down for so much of our time here.  Most days, all shops lock at 6.  Yesterday, Saturday, all shops locked at noon.  (Thank goodness a friend invited us over to her house for lunch when we realized there were no restaurants open.)  This has meant that my usual hunting grounds for interview subjects have been sparsely populated.  Even the usually raucous Kroo Town Road market was deserted when we went by yesterday.  Our driver David agreed with me that he couldn’t remember ever seeing it like that.  But then we hit on an idea:  what about the youths who wash cars, they are always there. 

I came down from the vehicle and started chatting with the young men.  They were surprised I could talk Krio, and when I asked if I could ask them a few questions about Ebola, they took me to their Chairman.  (In Sierra Leone, groups of young men who are struggling to make a living are often self-organized into groups:  okada drivers union, cassette sellers union, etc.).  They took me to sit in the nicest chair, and Nina followed along.  I said she was my friend from America and that she didn’t speak Krio.  They said, “You are welcome mommy.”  I cleaned my hands with hand sanitizer, then handed the bottle to the chairman, saying he should keep it.  He handed it around to the about ten young men gathered there.

The first thing they talked about was their “sufferness.”  Things are much harder for them under Ebola.  The chairman said, “in fact, we shouldn’t even be out here now, but we just have to ‘dreg’ (struggle to survive.)”  They said that the police have always harassed them, but that it’s even worse now.  One young man said he was released from the police station only yesterday, and that he was charged with public gathering but really it was a shakedown. 

The good news is that they were all aware of the Ebola messages:  avoid body contact, wash your hands with soap, don’t touch dead bodies, don’t attend funerals.  (That said, we were all sitting pretty close together.)  One joked that as car washers, since they spend all day with their hands in soapy water, they have the cleanest hands in Freetown. I asked whether they believed Ebola was real, and they enthusiastically said yes; that, in fact, in October one of the car washers just down the road had died from Ebola along with his wife, and that they had left behind two small children who had survived Ebola.  The chairman said he had attended the funeral—from a distance, as required—and that seeing all the fresh graves at the cemetery had really convinced him that this thing is real.  I asked whether they would welcome the two children to come and visit them, and there was some disagreement.  Some said, “of course I would be afraid to be near them.”  Others said, “but the government has said that once someone is cured we shouldn’t fear them. We should embrace them.”  Then I asked, “So you believe what the government says?”  And they said, “Oh yes, in fact, the President visited us here!  He came to us and told us that Ebola is real and that we should protect ourselves!” (Our driver later confirmed that, indeed, it was reported in the news that the president had driven there with his own car and talked with the youth personally.)  I asked if they were happy with the government’s response so far, and they said there had been delays early on because things were politicized, but that they really believed the president himself was doing a good job. It was only that he had greedy people around him who were making things difficult.  One said, “If the president tells us, we must believe.  After God is the president.” 

We then asked, well, if everyone has got the prevention message, how are people still getting Ebola?  They said, “well, we here in Freetown are educated, but the people in the rest of the country still believe in traditional culture.  They are stubborn and it’s very hard to get them to change.”  We asked, “If one of you had a fever or other symptoms, what would you do?”  They all said, “We would call 117 and go for testing because we are here so close together, if one of us were sick it would put us all in danger.”  I pushed a little, saying, “really?  You’d turn your colleague in?” And they admitted, “well, we’d call in secret so they wouldn’t know it was us who called.”

I said, “Well, we don’t want to get in trouble for gathering in a group.  Any other comments or questions?”  Then they said, “thank you mommy, we really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk to us.”  As we were walking back to the car, one of them asked me for Nina, and I had to disappoint him and say that Nina is already married. 

My sense is that, at least in Freetown, there is no longer denial that Ebola is real.  The basic prevention messages are getting out there.  However, some of the measures taken to control people’s movement are having a real economic impact on the poorest members of society.