Amid personal loss during the devastating outbreak, medical workers are training with Samaritan’s Purse staff to save lives and stop the spread of disease.
A nurse named Ngabu is in a training room in Ituri Province, learning how to put on a hazmat suit. His younger brother is lying in an isolation ward somewhere he cannot visit.
Medical workers practice chlorine disinfection techniques during infection prevention and control training.
Ngabu hasn’t seen him since his brother was transported to the facility. He doesn’t know when he will.
He saw two of his pastors die from the disease. Six of his neighbors have died. Colleagues have died. And even as he trains with our team and prepares to serve in our Ebola Treatment Center in the coming days, he’s grieving the losses in his community and region.
“Here in this room, we’re learning how to use chlorine and how to protect ourselves by correctly using the technique of putting on personal protective equipment (PPE) and taking off PPE so as not to be contaminated,” he said. “We want to cut the chain of transmission. It’s love. Love of neighbor.”
Local medical staff learn proper donning and doffing procedures during PPE training conducted by Samaritan’s Purse.
“It’s a great scourge for Ituri,” he said. “If no one comes to the aid of the population, we have no hope of living. It’s hard for me to watch someone die when I can do something, and I wanted to work with Samaritan’s Purse because I do have a bit of experience from the Ebola outbreak of 2019. I know that Samaritan’s Purse has the competence in the matter of this virus.”
For the medical workers training here, that labor is driven by love for friends, family, and neighbors. Many of them have already experienced heartbreaking loss.
Since late May, Samaritan’s Purse has been rushing supplies into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and to the Bunia community of Ituri Province. We have a large, well-established field office in the area and a longtime partner hospital already treating Ebola patients for several days before we arrived.
A Samaritan’s Purse staff member helps a trainee secure protective eyewear.
This most recent Ebola outbreak in the country is affecting nearly two dozen health zones in Ituri Province and beyond.
Samaritan’s Purse has been responding since May 24, when our 767 cargo plane departed North Carolina carrying many tons of medical supplies and protective equipment. We have a long history of fighting this disease — including operating an Ebola Treatment Center in Liberia in 2014 and caring for more than 600 patients in the DRC during the 2018-19 outbreak.
Soon we will open two Ebola Treatment Centers, one in Bunia and one at Nyankunde Hospital, because hospital and clinics are at near-full capacity with little means of separating Ebola patients from the general patient population.
“In Nyankunde, we’re setting up an Ebola isolation center right across the street from an existing hospital,” said Abigail McElheney, a Samaritan’s Purse program manager on the response. “This will allow that hospital to start maintaining proper isolation and prevent community spread between people with other medical conditions coming in.”
The treatment centers will enable teams to isolate Ebola patients and provide treatment to infected Congolese.
The center in Bunia is being constructed in an open field and will provide proper isolation with individual patient rooms. The center at Nyankunde is being built in an existing structure just across the street from the hospital.
Kim Wiebe, a critical care nurse from Canada and a member of our Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), said workers are also being trained in using the isolation areas. Many of the protocols are familiar to medical staff, a number of whom served in the previous Ebola response in DRC.
“This is a refresher training for many of the staff,” she said. “This ensures we’re all able to have safe practices and ensure that we can deliver really safe care to our patients.”
Workers raise a structure at one of our Ebola Treatment Centers under construction in Ituri Province.
Please pray as we prepare to receive patients in the coming days. Pray for protection for our staff and other workers, for healing among patients, and that the disease spread would be halted.
