By Wren Haynes | Echo
Emma Brown Yankuba is not the news story of Ebola.
Her voice is low and soothing, soft-spoken and rhythmic. The recording is from October 2014 when I requested that my friend at university in Kampala, Uganda, interview a Liberian student on my behalf.
"(Ebola) brings great fear," Emma said. "For Liberians, we always like to hug. We like to shake hands. But because of Ebola, nobody shakes anyone's hands."
Despite the strategy of limited contact, little travel and copious disinfectant, Ebola entered Emma's personal story early on in the epidemic. The first person in her church community to fall ill was a doctor. Working in the emergency room with Ebola patients, he caught the disease and was slowly fading when his coworkers brought him in for treatment. God, however, had other plans.
"Because . . . the church was praying for him and I was praying for him here in Uganda, God helped him and revived him," Emma said. "He's still alive. He recovered! He described the experience and he said it was so bad. . . . I believe God just helped him."
Despite his close call, he returned to work at the hospital because of his calling to save lives. Ebola is still a part of his story, but a part he overcame.
Emma's 27-year-old daughter is a medical student following in this man's footsteps. Despite the threat of Ebola, she decided to stay in Liberia and finish the last year of her biology degree. Even when the school finally closed, she stood firm.
"She is someone who loves people," Emma said. "She is very affectionate, and likes to help. I am sure she will continue to be a doctor."
Far away, we forget these people exist. Those like Emma. She is a middle-aged college student, a mother living with kids scattered between Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Her husband works for the United Nations. She talks about the difficult things in her life. She gives herself away. She trusts God.
Emma is not the news story of Ebola.
In a TED Talk given in 2009, Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, talked of "The danger of a single story." This single story, as she defines it, is the point when one narrative becomes the defining narrative of a country or a people.
Speaking of her college experience in America, Adichie told of how she consistently countered her roommate's perception of her as an African.
"What struck me was this," Adichie said. "(My roommate) had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me as an African was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe."
As Americans, we often pity West Africa as a region struck by epidemics and war. Yet these countries are not nations defined by brokenness, but the search for healing. They are not embodied in death tolls or infographics or the philanthropic copy of an aid organization.
No. They are people each with a journey as unique as yours and mine.
Ebola is not Liberia's story.
The story of a people is much more than that.
