Unsung Heroes

During 2014, the entire world feared for their, and their families', lives as the potency of the Ebola outbreak reached its zenith. Many people died and many more suffered, and to those who worked tirelessly to find a cure, to help the infected and their families, we owe them our eternal gratitude. However there are a group of people who have not been given the respect they deserve for the work that they did during this terrifying time. Today I'm going to tell you about the Red Cross 'safe and dignified burial programme' and how they, through volunteers' selfless contributions, became our guardian angels.

One of the main of the main aims of the safe and dignified burial programme was to prevent the Ebola virus from spreading through communities via toxic corpses; many communities in West Africa adhere to certain religious practices where people in the community wash the corpse as a way of cleansing the spirit before its passing into the afterlife. As well meaning as these practices were, it caused people in the community to become infected with the virus and then spread to other people from there. By implementing safe and cautioned burials, the Red Cross programme was able to reduce the number of people getting infected from toxic corpses thus reducing the rate of infection around the region. It is estimated that the programme prevented between 1,411 and 10,452 cases, which would have all inevitably gone on to cause more fatalities and from that more infections which would have, in the end, put everyone in the world more at risk.

The programme consisted of approximately 1,500 volunteers and together they carried out over 47,000 burials over the course of just about over a year. Most of the volunteers consisted of normal West African civilians such as college students and teachers, they had no obligation to put themselves through what they did yet they did it anyway for the well-being of their people, and all of us around the world.

It's difficult to imagine how much time they spent collecting, disinfecting and then burying the bodies, and on top of that to imagine how it felt to look upon distraught families and communities every single day as they came to collect the dead. They deserve more recognition and I hope that everyone who reads this today, passes on the heroic acts of those volunteers to their peers because without their help, who knows where we'd be right now.

Thank for you for reading, this has been Timothy K. Bosse and I hope that you found this insightful. Have a great day.


Citations:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40375693
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4709130/

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