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Ambassador Stevens: “Ebola is not gone yet.”
New Haven is sending four ambulances and $16,000 in medical supplies to its Ebola-torn sister city in Sierre Leone, after a three-month community campaign exceeded its fundraising goal.
Officials Monday announced results of the campaign at a City Hall press conference.
New Haven set out to raise $100,000 to help its sister city of Freetown cope with the outbreak of the deadly virus. It ended up collecting $114,000 in donations plus $25,000 of emergency supplies from Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Much of the money came from public-school teachers, administrators and students; sororities and fraternities and local not-for-profits; churches; and Yale-New Haven’s medical staff, which put in $25,000, according to Althea Norcott, who heads New Haven’s Freetown sister city committee.
Campaign members cheer Monday’s announcement.
“We are a small city with a big heart. I couldn’t be more proud of this community,” declared Mayor Toni Harp, who last November hosted the campaign’s kick-off.
New Haven’s ambulances “will help to change the game” in Sierre Leone, which continues to be devastated by Ebola, said the African nation’s U.S. ambassador, H.E. Bockari K. Stevens. Stevens attended Monday’s press conference to thank New Haven personally.
When the virus broke out, the country of seven million people had a total of five ambulances, Stevens said. Some 3,000 citizens have since died. New cases continue to be reported daily.
“Ebola is not gone yet. But we are determined to beat Ebola. We now know about it more. We understand it. … We have launched a massive campaign for our people
“Of course there are pockets of our people who cannot forget their old practices. … You need only one person to forget to wash their hands. You only need one person to go and play with a diseased Ebola person. And it can spread to a whole community. That is why the president two days ago have brought back some draconian measures to make sure that people have to follow the protocol that has been set.
“To tell a mother not to touch a sickly child — that is very, very difficult. We are fighting hard to get people to know that if we don’t stop Ebola, our nation is finished. Economic activity is dead. Children are not going to schools. … Industries are closing. Tourism is zero. So we have to fight.”
Al Marder called the ambulances a return favor of sorts. Marder, who at 93 continues to work as an activist in town, traced New Haven’s relationship to Freetown back 174 years, when Singe Pieh and the other Amistad captives (originally from Freetown) arrived here after a successfull mutiny aboard their slave trip. They eventually won their freedom in a landmark case that, Marder said, helped launch the U.S.‘s abolitionist movement. Marder is pictured handing Ambassador Stevens a mini-replica of the Amistad statue that’s outside New Haven City Hall.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro called Freetown’s “resilience in the face of such adversity” “awe inspiring.”
“We want the people of Freetown to know that their brothers and sisters in New Haven, Connecticut, care about their plight and want to help them however that we can,” DeLauro said.