Saturday, October 18, 2014

A little commercial...

I’ve been wondering how long it would take for me to write a blog post like this….Ebola. Now, Ebola has yet to be officially found in Kenya yet there is always a discussion about it. While the current areas of infection are not close, it is also not possible to believe that Kenya will be safe from Ebola forever. It most likely will happen, but it’s just a matter of when and how it will happen. Nonetheless, prevention is a huge part, and I encountered a very surreal moment of this prevention this past week.

This past Friday, a few of my friends and I decided to head to a bar we had been to before. It is fairly close to where we live and pretty convenient to get to. We had been there before and it was a nice atmosphere to hang out at. We arrived and were enjoying some drinks at our table, when we noticed something very unique on the television. It was a commercial for Ebola prevention.

It was one of the most surreal feelings I’ve had. I was casually at a relatively up-scale bar with some friends, and the commercials during the soccer game were Ebola prevention commercials.

Whether or not we notice it on a daily basis this country is on edge about Ebola, but I will say the manner in which they have been handling it is far more admirable than what seems to be happening in the United States.

The Ministry of Health has published announcements in the newspaper, there are easy-to-understand commercials, and the radio frequently is talking about it. However, through all of this discussion there is a very small sense of panic. It is hard to say how prepared Kenya actually is (recent articles about health-care workers and their training does not make it look very promising), but this nation is resilient. Even more admirable, is that throughout this discussion they is always the rhetoric of “helping our brothers and sisters in West Africa”, a sentiment that I wish would emerge more from the United States.

What was more surreal was seeing the issues that this commercial highlighted including: washing dead bodies, and refrain from eating bats. While these two factors are incredibly important in preventing Ebola from spreading, these are not warning that will be seen in the US. It was a very odd juxtaposition between the direct environment we were in (a place where if it weren’t for the security, you might forget where you are) and what the TV is featuring as its commercials. As part of our safety here, we are all monitoring the situation very closely, and necessary precautions will be taken if needed. We will remain safe.

More exciting than the commercial, was the fact that as we were leaving it was raining incredibly hard. So hard you could barely see the road in front of you and the staff at the bar, had to keep pushing the overhang to prevent it from caving in. It was quite the heart-racing taxi ride home.

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