Speaker Meeting, 6.15 for 6.30pm

In the photograph - Brigadier Charlie Herbert from the UK’s Ebola taskforce with a young survivor of the virus in Magazine Wharf, a Freetown slum. Photograph: Kate Holt for the Guardian

Extract from an article in The Guardian of 4 Nov 2015

In Magazine Wharf, one of Freetown’s largest slums, rivers of stinking mud and debris tumble from the central market, down a steep hill crammed with precarious wood- and tin-built dwellings. The homes continue all the way down to the sea, where there is a small fishing port.

Roughly 3,500 people live here, housed in narrow alleyways where women crouch over fires, smoking fish next to children washing in buckets. Pigs and chickens wander freely.

Families are squashed in so tightly that the cacophony of children, laughter and shouting is deafening.

It is unsurprising that the Ebola virus spread through these tiny streets. The first recorded case here was a 28-year-old man in October last year, the last as recent as August. Magazine Wharf is where Ebola lingered longest in Sierra Leone’s capital.

“It began in this house,” said brigadier Charlie Herbert, pointing to a wonky, wooden two-room structure that houses a family of seven.

“We had to quarantine the house. Then the whole street,” said the second in command of the taskforce for Ebola, the UK’s cross-government response in Sierra Leone, which combines support from the Department for International Development (DfID), the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Herbert’s task was to contain the spread by enforcing the quarantine but also to prevent public disorder. Remarkably, he says the situation only once “turned ugly”. A second near-crisis was averted in the early, chaos-strewn days of the outbreak, when two women from the Wharf escaped from a treatment centre.

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