Ebola Gossip

I had a long drive to Mbale from Kampala and got to talking about a great many things with my driver Moses. One of them was Ebola. Right after I left Uganda last time there was an Ebola outbreak that was reported on weirdly in the US and I wanted the inside scoop-- boy did I go to the right place. Apparently Moses is a driver for an agency that was actively involved in the response so he was up to date. Here's what I learned.

Once upon a time there was a man in Kibaale who got in a fight with his wife. He went West to the DRC to find himself a new wife. "I'll show her!" I imagine him saying. He picked up a lovely lady in DRC and brought her back to his family in Kibaale and she started to get really sick. Witchcraft! Everyone assumed the first wife had cast a spell on the second and was making her sick. The police arrested her and threw her in jail. In the mean time, sick new wife infected everyone NOT in jail in the family with Ebola and they all died. And the moral is, don't take a second wife, she could have Ebola. Moral two: there are some upsides to being accused of witchcraft- like unintentional isolation during an epidemic.

Anyway, the less dramatic part of the story involved the death count which was almost entirely from that one family (excepting the first wife) plus two health workers. One of the health workers worked for the organization in Kampala where Moses drives his vehicle. So a colleague of Moses's drove this infected person to Kampala (and that's where the weird headlines about Ebola in the capital came from) but she died before arriving and they did a U-turn and when back to Kibaale--- the hospital wasn't super interested in letting an Ebola-ridden dead body out of the car.

At this point my question was "it wasn't this car, right?". It wasn't. But Moses has had to go back and forth to Kibaale to drive epidemiologists and aid workers who don't want to spend the weekends there.  Super comforting. I made some awkward comment like "well, here's hoping you wash your hands a lot!" and then stopped asking questions.