Flomoku Trust Transcript

Flomoku Trust Transcript

My role was to mobilize our partners. The partners who I work with are the women, the youth, and the traditional leaders. Our main focus was with traditional leaders. My role as head of the Carter Center team was to help work along with other partners to design specific interventions, and what we were focused on from our side, as the Carter Center team, was to use our platform. Over the years, we've been able to work with traditional leaders to build confidence, trust and confidence, and that's what we used during Ebola because if you see from the start of the outbreak, there were issues of trust. Citizens did not trust the government and so they refused to listen to messages from the government, even though they knew that people from their community were infected, people were dying, but they refused to accept the message from the government that something was wrong. That's because over the years there's been a big gap of trust between the governed and those that had authority. We over the years have worked with the chiefs. We've worked with them by telling them the truth--we've been able to bring information to them. We've been able to live up to when we made promises to them. So that trust helped us to engage. I brought that to the table at the level of decision makers when we went to these many sessions that took many, many days to decide what to do, why people were dying. We were simply just trying to tell them, this is the target group; these are the people we should work with. Instead of coming and spending one week to develop messages, go and tell the messages--before you can release the message, people are dying. Let's reach out to the people, because then it was easier to know that all of the don'ts about what helps to spread Ebola were targeted at actual traditional practices. We were working with traditional people, so we said, the easier thing to do is to bring these people on board--they can help us if they understand what is happening. At first they were resistant because people wanted to bring in experts. It was good to bring the experts to talk about how you can manage, because this is strange to this region, it's strange to this country. Experts were needed, but you also needed the local expertise. That's what we were providing […]