10 Jan 2016

While the rest of the world was gripped with fear of the dreaded Ebola disease that ravaged through West Africa in countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, some people lived through it and Mr Kabo Khumoetsile is one of them. 

Mr Khumoetsile, 25, grew up in Francistown and had never travelled anywhere out of Botswana until he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. When a vacation to do voluntary missionary work outside Botswana came, he jumped at the opportunity. Two of them were chosen from Botswana to join other fellow volunteers from other countries. 

“The mission to West Africa was to initiate people into Christianity, teach them about repentance, baptism and carry out humanitarian work.” 

Their first stop was Ghana at the Mission Training Centre where they were assessed and assigned to different West African countries, where he was to serve his missionary work for two years and he was assigned to Freetown, Sierra Leone. 

The first two months in Sierra Leone were the best months of his life, Mr Khumoetsile said, as he experienced first-hand the rich culture of the people until Ebola struck.

“One day while we were home relaxing and enjoying ourselves as usual, an email came from our mission president that there is a certain deadly and incurable disease called Ebola that is killing people in Liberia and Guinea and that we must stay alert as it might be headed to Sierra Leone. 

He said indeed Ebola came to Sierra Leone through an unknown woman coming into Sierra Leone at a small town of Kenema, close to the border with Guinea. 

“As for us, we were by then far away from Kenema, about five hours drive to Freetown,” he said. Furthermore, Mr Khumoetsile narrated that the Ministry of Health in Sierra Leone gave their area doctor instructions on how to stay safe from contracting the disease. 

Some of those instructions, he said, included keeping a clean and habitable environment by washing their hands and mopping floors regularly with bleach detergents and avoiding handshakes. 

Since their mission work included house-to-house preaching and visitations, he said every compound was expected to place a basin at the gate with water and clorox for visitors to wash hands and dip their shoes before going inside the house.

“Some elderly people who didn’t understand the danger of the disease were sometimes angry with us for entering their compounds and refusing to shake their hands, but as time went on, people started to understand the ‘no hand-shake rule. It was horrible as people started acting hostile towards each other,” Mr Khumoetsile noted. 

He said he was then transferred to the second city of Liberia in BO, staying at J-Quarters owned by a respectable civil war victim and a pioneer of their church’s first branch in Sierra Leone, Muhammad Toure.

“In BO we saw first-hand scenarios of people who contracted Ebola and three people from our neighbourhood perished from the disease and that is when we started panicking. 

News came from Kenema that Ebola there has gone viral. We had some of our missionary fellows in Kenema and they had to be evacuated to a safer place. The first quarantine was built in Kenema and there were hundreds of check zones to quarantine people and restrict their movements. 

“I remember one time we were closed into our compounds for a week while nurses and military personnel scoured the whole country knocking on every door examining people for any trace of Ebola, it was terrible.” he said. 

As the situation got worse with more new cases of Ebola, Mr Khumoetsile said the President of Sierra Leone advised them to leave while they still could. Embassies closed in large numbers, shops, bars and restaurants too. 

He said their mission president who took care of all missionaries together with his wife decided it was best they left Sierra Leone and they left to Liberia. 

“Liberia was even worse as I and many of my fellows lost our visas to connecting flights out of West Africa because we had left Sierra Leone in a rush, so we were stranded in Liberia for hours at the airport waiting for solutions. The president of Liberia, Ms Ellen Johnson Sirleaf ordered all departing planes to have left the country within 48 hours as after that all airports around the country would be closed. 

It was chaos at the airport of Liberia with many people who were free of Ebola wanting to leave the country. Airplanes lined the runway in numbers to taxi out of the country. At last the church chartered a flight out of the country for us and even though many of us lost some of our luggage, we were glad to be far away from Ebola,” he said.

From Liberia, he and some of his fellow missionaries from countries such as the United States of America, Asia and Europe landed in Ghana before connecting to their home countries.  He came home and served in the Broadhurst mission for nine months, then Windhoek, Namibia for four months and then, Shoshanguve, Hammanskraal and Pretoria in South Africa for five months.

“My trip to Sierra Leone taught me to really appreciate my country as we are much better off economically than most countries there. I remember crying so much one day after seeing mud houses which I was told was a primary school in a capital city. When the teacher told me her monthly salary, I calculated it to be less than that of a security guard in Botswana. However my fondest memory of Sierra Leone was when I taught a young girl how to make ice-pops from sweet-aid. 

People there didn’t know you could use sweet-aid to make ice-pop,” he said. Ends