My friend Oretha knows everyone and everything about Cuttington University. So one day last February I invited her to visit and, over pepper soup, my heart spoke. “Do you know any good tailors?” I asked. “I want to learn to sew.” The next morning she returned with Mistress Yekeh and a bright light entered my life.
The same age as my mother, Mistress Yekeh taught tailoring at a vocational school before the war and travelled with her trusty Butterfly machine throughout the conflict. Trying to make a new start, she had gotten a job at the Cuttington library and was working toward a degree in education. She no longer sewed professionally but was willing to help me so she could earn money to finish plastering her house.
She quickly became one of my best friends.
I bought my own machine and she came over on the weekends to teach me the secrets of Liberian tailors. She’d give me an assignment and the next week I’d have to present it for inspection. Without fail she would drop her head and try unsuccessfully to hold back the laughter. Pulling herself together she’d straighten up and tell me, “It’s good for a learner. You tried. You actually tried.” Then she’d throw it back in my lap. “Now tear the seams. That’s the only way you will learn to do it right.”
Some weeks I’d protest, “But it’s on the inside! I’m the only one wearing it!” She always had the same response, “If you let yourself do bad work that’s all you’ll ever do. Try to be perfect. Then you’ll feel proud.” So I tore all my seams and, gradually, stopped repeating my mistakes.
As school restarted and the semester got busy we had fewer lessons, but I still saw her almost every day. She’d leave the library to walk to her village about the time I struggled to haul my bags up the hill in my tight lappa skirt. “Heeeeey, African woman!” she’d yell, “Did you finish your assignment yet?” I would shake my head and laugh, she would shake her head and laugh, and we’d both continue home.
In May I had a birthday party at Oretha’s bar and Mistress Yekeh was one of the first people I invited. She made a beautiful speech and we all danced until the rain came. It was one of the last times we spent together. Finals came and along with it graduation. I traveled to Sanniquellie and Yekepa and spent long days at my office. There was just no time for sewing.
Photo courtesy Rebekah Schultz: “In May I threw a joint birthday party with my son. My sewing teacher and dear friend Mistress Yekeh, pictured in the yellow skirt suit, danced with us for hours.”
Then at the end of July I left for a short vacation and Ebola shut down Liberia. Campus closed and Mistress Yekeh went back to Monrovia to stay with her daughter and her elderly mother.
A few weeks ago they all died of Ebola.
The news just reached me this week through the friend of a friend. I’ve been calling friends in Monrovia weekly but I hadn’t kept in touch with her because I thought she was still on campus, safe from the worst of the out break. So sure was I of her safety that I’d already packed a gift for her upon my inevitable return.
Like most Liberian women, Mistress Yekeh was a force. At fifty-seven she had seen the worst side of humanity and the hardest side of life… and survived to laugh about it. But the difference between violence and viruses is everyone knows how to run from bullets: grab your family and go.
But Ebola comes quietly and kills painfully. With not enough treatment centers families are asked to literally watch their loved ones die before their eyes. I know when Mistress Yekeh’s mother or daughter fell ill the last thing she was thinking was to run. In Liberia family is everything and the tragedy of Ebola is that the tighter that bond, the more people love and care for each other, the more deadly the disease becomes.
Ebola isn’t ravaging West Africa because people are dirty or uneducated: it’s precisely because people care and love on a level we, as Americans, have lost touch with.
Through a twist of coincidence the news of Mistress Yekeh’s death reached me around the same time an Ebola case was reported in Texas. The vitriol I saw in the news and read in Facebook feeds. The fear. The running I could feel in people’s hearts. What I want people in America to understand is that Ebola is not a threat to them because America has hospitals. It has doctors. Americans aren’t asked to take their sick loved ones back to the rented room they share with five other people. They have more than plastic shopping bags to protect their hands from contamination.
When will we, as an international community, realize we can do better? Liberia spent fourteen years tearing seams and now, just as things were starting to come back together, they’re tearing again. I pray we can get it right this time. There’s just too much at stake.
Rebekah Schulz has been a teacher in Liberia since 2011, when she first traveled there as a Peace Corps Volunteer. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and a native of Columbia, Missouri she blogs at lifemagnanimous.com, where this post was first published.
Beautiful and sad.
The fearful (and fear-mongering) reaction to Ebola in America shames us greatly.
Instead of asking “How can we help?” we run like cowards and spend our efforts trying to expel victims of disease.
Ironically, such cowardice will both increase the scope, severity, and possibly the communicability of the disease if it is allowed to rage unchecked in Africa. While at the same time, preserving our current ignorance over the most effective treatment methods and techniques for avoiding transmission.
Our fear, ignorance and bigotry is likely to kill quite a few of us unless we find our courage, and open our hearts to confront this threat with the true spirit of American exceptionalism that inspired us to create the Peace Corps, rather than the border walls and security state.
RIP Mistress Yekeh. I wish your courage inspired more of us, instead of making us pee in our Amurkan flag underwear.
Thank you for this moving piece. I truly don’t know what to say.
Wonderful piece. I’m so sorry for the loss of your friends. And I’m even more despairing of the fear and vitriol that is daily whipped into irrational frenzy by our pathetic media in their never-ending sensationalism and ratings mongering. I hope your piece is widely read because your perspective is of great value.
For your information, however, the US and the world community are right now in the process of building a number mobile isolation units, training and sending team of health providers to help stem the tide of infection in West Africa, mobilizing the strong public health infrastructure to prevent outbreaks here domestically.
Please pressure the mainstream media to be more responsible and informative about their coverage. Use whatever platform you might have to call out irresponsible fear-mongering in the mainstream press.
The conservative loonies are going to do what they can to whip up fear, but regular reporters and pundits should be called out and embarrassed for their ignorance. And they only respond to people with their own platform.
Here is some information you can use:
FACT SHEET: The US reponse to ebola in West Africa
What? You are just NOW figuring out that most Alpha Conservative Americans are PROUDLY IGNORANT, NARCISSISTIC, COWARDS?
Great little slice of human life story and a welcome break from the palpitations of rich news media fear babies.