Watching the progress of the Ebola with close and sad attention. Seems as if people have changed little in the last 600 years.
Famine is coming to the places hardest hit. People are too ill, or too afraid to harvest crops. And nobody is willing to go far to buy.
Last weeek the NY Times showed a small girl abandoned on a sidewalk, too ill to even lift her head. I can only hope that when the space-suits came for her she was too sick to know. She will never know that some woman so far away wept for her. (Weeps for her now.)
And yet, and yet. There are heroes too. People who stay with the sick and dying, with courage, with cost. Most of these people will never be known. That has not changed either. Hard heavy work, dealing with the sick, the dying, the dead. And usually done by women. Old women
I am reminded that the lying out of the dead, the 'making them decent,' is a thing of all times, and world wide. How horrible that that that comfort is denied the families of these people.
Famine is coming to the places hardest hit. People are too ill, or too afraid to harvest crops. And nobody is willing to go far to buy.
Last weeek the NY Times showed a small girl abandoned on a sidewalk, too ill to even lift her head. I can only hope that when the space-suits came for her she was too sick to know. She will never know that some woman so far away wept for her. (Weeps for her now.)
And yet, and yet. There are heroes too. People who stay with the sick and dying, with courage, with cost. Most of these people will never be known. That has not changed either. Hard heavy work, dealing with the sick, the dying, the dead. And usually done by women. Old women
I am reminded that the lying out of the dead, the 'making them decent,' is a thing of all times, and world wide. How horrible that that that comfort is denied the families of these people.
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eglantine_br- eglantine_br
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you have put it all very well in your usual humane and graceful way
only one slightly obscure sign of hope this week for me anyway and it came from a place nothing to do with Ebola pe se
I was watching a TV quiz show the other night and the one team of students from a Cambridge college were introduced with the words that their college had been founded in 1352 as a response by the townspeople to the lack of trained young men in the professions after the Black Death .. and it resonated with me. We need to move far more quickly to try to end this terrible out break but we also need afterward to help those children who have survived, as many will but with diminished resources and lost families but who, like those young men in faraway medieval Cambridge, will be the hope of the post epidemic nations.