DAKAR – “Are you going to die?” my 8-year-old daughter asked me the other day. “They said on the radio that adults are getting sick and dying.” "Maybe you should stay inside." Instantly I was flooded with the anguish so many parents around the world are carrying right now because we cannot protect our children from these grown-up fears.
My daughter already knows parents can die in epidemics. Her biological father was one of them. We don’t talk much about her early life in Sierra Leone, when 3,956 people died during the Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016.
Then, as now with the coronavirus, there was no vaccine and no cure. And yet nearly two years after her adoption, Ebola still falls into our conversations when we least expect it.