9月23日VOA聽力：活動有助下降康健年紀
As health officials in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leonestruggle to eliminate the final cases of Ebola, a newreport said some hard lessons have been learned.The group International Alert says a lack of trustbetween the Liberian people and their governmentmade the outbreak worse.
The report’s author, Ashoka Mukpo, said that “many people mistrust official institutions andeven feel threatened by them.
Mukpo, an American, is an Ebola survivor himself. He contracted the disease last year inMonrovia.
It was a bad couple of weeks. I was very, very sick. I’ve never been that sick in my life and I wasquite scared.
After being treated for five days in Liberia, he was airlifted to a medical facility in the U.S. stateof Nebraska.
The International Alert report is entitled Surviving Ebola: Public Perceptions of Governance andthe Outbreak Response in Liberia.
International Alert is an organization that looks at underlying dynamics to maintain peace infragile states. And one of the things we’re really curious about with the Ebola outbreak inLiberia is how much did people’s perceptions toward government contribute to the outbreak?And what we found when we talked to people is that there were very high levels of mistrustand suspicion towards the government’s motives. And this was really what underpinnedpeople’s initial refusal to take their warning seriously about how deadly Ebola was,
The mistrust, he said, stemmed from history and unfulfilled expectations.
On one hand, Liberia has quite a history of tension between citizens and government. It had acivil war about 15 years ago. But I think right now what people felt is that there is thistremendous sense of hope. That with President Johnson Sirleaf’s election this would meandevelopment and accountability for corruption and these kinds of things. And the resultsactually have been quite disappointing. So, people are savvy enough to see that what theywere hoping would happen hasn’t actually happened.
Mukpo said Liberians had expected more from the healthcare system when the Ebola outbreaktook hold.
People felt like so many millions of dollars have gone into aid and development over the past 10years. With the health sector that completely collapsed so quickly, there was this perceptionthat, well, there must have been some kind of corruption – that people were taking money andnot putting it into places it was supposed to go. So, fair or not, if you look at the record of thisgovernment in battling corruption, it’s been so poor that even if there were much biggerissues, you know, with how hard it is to fight an Ebola outbreak people’s perceptionsautomatically went to corruption.
He said, however, perceptions were not the same for the international community.
You know, actually, I was really surprised by this. As someone who lived in Liberia for a fewyears I really expected that the levels of trust in the international community would have beenequally as low as the government. Because, you know, I’ve heard people say, well, these are thefolks who support this government [in] the way that they act. But actually the levels of trustthat were given to the international community were much higher than the government. Infact, most of the remarks in most of the reports on the international community’sperformance during Ebola, and just, in general, its concern for Liberians, was very high.
He said that “one of the critical and under reported narratives” of Liberia’s Ebola crisis involvedcommunity leaders.
Initially, there was this really authoritative effort to quarantine communities and force them todo things differently. And it kind of didn’t work. And what really worked is once you sat downwith communities – and once the government actually got to community leaders and said,look, what can we do to assist you in fighting this outbreak? What do you need from us andwhat can you do to help? Then once that kind of collaborative effort started, then that’s reallywhen you started to see cases reduce.
Mukpo said community trust played a major role in the safe burial of Ebola victims. Touchingand washing dead bodies helped spread the disease, despite government warnings against thetraditional practice.
Really, when you’ve got community volunteers involved, these are the people whose neighborsdoing these secret burials，whose neighbors were hiding the sick. So, it’s much easier to hidesomebody from an official who doesn’t live in your neighborhood than from someone who grewup 30 yards away. They come and knock on your door and say, you know, look, I hear yoursister is sick. We need to take her to the clinic. And I really think that was the tipping point thatonce it was people that folks trusted and that knew had their best interests in mind, that that’sreally when people started to be more cooperative and change their behavior.
The International Alert report said, “Post-Ebola policy-making and aid delivery must take intoaccount the need to repair the bonds between Liberians and their government, in order tostrengthen good governance and accountability.It added that projects that seek tostrengthen health services, promote good governance and rebuild service delivery mustincorporate civil society and communities into planning and decision-making.
It also recommended that security forces exercise restraint during demonstrations andprotests, that anti-corruption agencies be strengthened, and that the Liberian governmentsupport a free press and civil society.
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