Bugli Initial Transcript

Bugli Initial Transcript

[A]ll the way really through June, even parts of July, it was a pretty calm reaction.

We had noticed that in Conakry, in the capital, they were starting to make some public health responses to it, in the sense of if you went to some of the fancier restaurants, they would make you wash your hands before you went in. Because soap and water aren't exactly the most ubiquitous out there, they would actually just have really chlorinated water, and so everyone was walking around with really dry hands [laughter] or just over-using hand sanitizer. But they also started implementing the--[laughs] they would just call it, it was like a fist bump for Ebola, instead of shaking hands. Small public health interventions and recommendations to help slow the spread of disease. We were starting to notice those things, but again, they didn't have a great impact on my day. I didn't really--it didn't really change what I was doing.

It wasn't until closer to June and July that we started hearing about more cases, and there was more in Conakry, and more in other places and in other smaller villages in Guinea. Because again, someone would either be a patient or someone who had just passed away from Ebola, would be transported back to that village to be buried, and then funeral rites usually involve a lot of touching and a lot of handling of the body, and it spreads again. We saw those problems throughout the entire response. But this was just the beginnings of it, and we had just heard about these things. It wasn't through any news source, it was just through Peace Corps a little bit […]