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    Tuesday, 11 November 2014

    Ebola outbreak: Braving threats to bury Sierra Leone dead



    As Mariatu Kagbo makes her way up the steep hillside from her family home and walks towards the main road, several people shout out "Ebola!"
    At best, they mean it as a taunt.

    At worst it is a threat - an expression of the fear people hold in Old Wharf, a poor suburb outside Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, that Ms Kagbo could bring the virus back home with her from her new job.
    "They're mocking me. They call me names. Sometimes they attack," says Ms Kagbo, a 37-year-old mother of six, who volunteered to join a Red Cross burial team a fortnight ago.
    "They can say what they want. I say to myself - if I don't do it, who will?" she declares with conviction.

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    At night when I lie down I see their faces”
    Mariatu Kagbo Red Cross Burial Team
    After half an hour squeezed into the back of a public taxi, Ms Kagbo catches up with her teammates in Waterloo - a town badly hit by the Ebola outbreak.
    "Two dead," says her supervisor, as their two-vehicle convoy sets off for the first job, in a nearby fishing village called Tombo.
    A crowd has gathered outside a small home near the water's edge.
    Some women are wailing.
    A man approaches to say that someone else has fallen ill.
    "We're only here for the dead - you need to call the hotline," says one of the burial team.

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