FROM: U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
U.S. Mission to the United Nations: Remarks at the GOAL USA Annual Benefit Ball
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
New York, NY
October 18, 2014
AS DELIVERED
Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Barry, for that generous introduction. Let me also welcome Ambassador David Donoghue – my colleague and co-conspirator – the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations, who is here tonight.
I’m very honored to have been asked to join you for GOAL’s dinner. I’d like to begin, somewhat abruptly, by reading you an excerpt from a news story.
“And there I saw the dying, the living and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them and the earth, save a few miserable rags. To point to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time as all were in the same state; and not a single house could boast of being free from death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last resting place.”
Now, this could have been written today about a village or neighborhood in one of the countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak. But it was published in 1847 in the Illustrated London News. The author, a young journalist and artist from Cork, named James Mahoney, was describing the scene he witnessed upon arriving in the town of Bridgetown, in southern Ireland, during the famine.
I begin here because while GOAL is an international humanitarian organization, it is also an Irish organization. GOAL was started by an Irishman, a former sports journalist in fact; an Irish football fan who, like all Irish football fans, was doomed to a life of heartbreak and suffering.
But he decided to dedicate his life to alleviating even greater, truer, suffering around the world.
I begin with the snapshot of the famine because it is impossible to understand the proud tradition of Irish generosity or the passion for service that drives GOALies in the field, without understanding the history of the Irish people.
When people come through an experience as harrowing as the scene that Mahoney described in 1847, empathy is in the bloodstream - it’s in the genes. It was in the bloodstream of my greatest mentor and my best friend, my mother, who brought me to this country from Ireland when I was nine. And I trust and hope it will be in the bloodstream of my kids, Declan and Rian.
These days, people often tell me that my last name, Power, is an appropriate one for representing the United States. What they don’t know, but what probably many of the people in this room do know, is that the surname Power comes from the Irish, de Paor, which means “of the poor.”
With a name like this, and the responsibilities that go with it, how could I not join GOAL tonight, when so many here are gathering in support of an organization that does so much for the most vulnerable and the most poor around the world?
There are so many worthy humanitarian crises that GOAL works on, that the United Nations works on, that the United States government, the Irish government work on; any one of them I could choose to talk about tonight, but I want to focus on Ebola because despite growing international awareness of the outbreak’s severity and mounting commitments, it has to be said, during recent weeks, we are still far behind the terrifying curve of this deadly virus. And the longer we wait to scale up our response, the harder it is for us to bend the curve downward and to stop the exponential spread. That means the greater the risk that we all face, no matter where we live in the world.
GOAL’s experience responding to the outbreak on the ground underscores the extent of the challenges the entire international community faces – and most importantly the infected communities face in dealing with this epidemic. And the interventions by GOAL and partners show how local, targeted interventions can make a profound difference in slowing the spread of this deadly virus.
Let me just give you two examples from the town of Kenema, a district in eastern Sierra Leone. According to Sierra Leone’s Health Ministry, 429 cases of Ebola had been confirmed in Kenema by October 1st – the second highest number of any district in the country of Sierra Leone. More than 20 health care workers in the district had lost their lives treating waves of patients at Kenema’s hospital.
In Sierra Leone, the government tasked the police with taking the lead in maintaining quarantines of people suspected of having infections. However, as GOAL staff in Kenema observed, police had little idea how to quarantine properly. GOALie Gillian McKay wrote in mid-September from Kenema that, “In some cases, police officers can be found sitting on the terrace of a quarantined house, eating food that the family has cooked.” In other cases, she wrote, “Quarantined individuals may be permitted to fetch water or go to the market because as long as they do not run away, the quarantine is being observed in the eyes of the police.”
The consequences of this lack of knowledge were swift and devastating. Not only did the poorly imposed quarantines fail to keep the virus from spreading, but three police officers who were enforcing them were themselves infected and later died. Many more police in Kenema feared they would be next.
Overwhelmed, the local police chief asked GOAL to train his officers in how to safely and effectively implement the quarantine. GOAL developed a training module that balanced the need to prevent the Ebola’s spread with the need to treat possible victims with dignity, rather than as prisoners or pariahs. The training included health professionals as well as Ebola survivors, who could tell the police how it felt to be on the other side of a quarantine – a perspective too rarely taken into account.
The program trained over 2,400 police officers in a month. They in turn have trained other police officers. And since the training began, GOAL reports that no additional Kenema police officers have been infected, and that the quality of quarantines has dramatically improved.
A second example from Kenema of a challenge across the region is the danger of misinformation. Early in the outbreak, word spread through social media in Sierra Leone that washing with salt water could prevent and cure infections. Meanwhile, as more people died in Kenema’s government hospital, a rumor spread that the virus was a sham, and that victims’ bodies were being used for cannibalistic rituals. At the end of July, an angry mob of thousands of people marched on the hospital, threatening to remove patients and bodies and burn the building to the ground. This gives you some sense of the challenge that all who are trying to deal with this epidemic are facing. It is an uphill battle.
At the very least, rumors like these have hampered efforts to contain the virus; at worst, they left countless people more vulnerable to infection. Yet in a climate of growing fear and limited understanding, rumors are spreading as fast as the virus itself.
Interventions by humanitarian aid organizations show, though, how the swift dissemination of accurate, easy-to-understand information can help offset these rumors and undermine the harm that those rumors are causing. In Sierra Leone, for example, public service announcements on local radio stations are now helping to dispel the fiction around false cures. To raise awareness about the causes of infections and the risks of customary practices like hand-washing the bodies of deceased relatives, GOAL and others enlisted the help of community activists, who can build on existing trust and relationships to spread awareness from the grassroots up.
The lack of knowledge among police about how to carry out a safe, effective quarantine, and the spread of these rumors are just two of the many challenges that GOAL and others responding to the crisis have faced, in Kenema and well beyond. Sierra Leone still has only a quarter of the beds it needs for sick patients. Schools in the country have been closed since July. Burial teams continue to lack adequate protection and the protective gear that they need. The list goes on. Guinea and Liberia face many of the same problems, and new problems of their own.
Under President Obama’s leadership, the United States is stepping up to help to address these challenges. We have contributed more than $350 million in humanitarian assistance and deployed more than 600 U.S. government personnel from USAID, from the CDC, and from the Defense Department – it's the largest-ever U.S. response to a global health crisis. We’re committed to sending up to 3,900 U.S. forces to the region and the U.S. military is already overseeing the construction of up to 17 100-bed Ebola Treatment Units, and we’re establishing a training hub where we will train up to 500 health care workers each week on how to safely interact with patients who have contracted this virus.
Some governments in the United Nations are punching well above their weight. I'll give you a couple of examples: Cuba has sent 165 doctors to West Africa – to Sierra Leone, in fact; Timor-Leste has pledged $1 million to the effort, notwithstanding itself, not that long ago, having come out of its own conflict and having tremendous needs at home. Humanitarian organizations too are doing tremendous work. Medecins Sans Frontiers, International Medical Corps, the Red Cross, and GOAL – these are organizations that are on the front lines. These are individuals who comprise these organizations, who are putting themselves into the hot zone because they know that they can remain safe and they know that they can save countless lives; and that they will contribute to putting an end to one of the worst health crises the world has ever seen.
Yet much, much more is needed. According to the UN’s financial tracking service, only 25 counties have pledged $1 million or more to the effort. There are 193 in the United Nations – 25 just. The UN has only received a little more than a third of the funds that they currently need – and that’s just for right now. In Guinea and Sierra Leone, the number of infections is projected to double every three to four weeks; in Liberia, infections are projected to double every 2 weeks. This is bad.
The international community isn’t just losing the race to Ebola. We are getting lapped, at present.
And it’s not just governments and NGOs that have to do their part. It is the private sector and private institutions, philanthropies, and individual donors. Far too few are giving far too little, counting on others to step up. Those of us who have made announcements, like the United States government, have to keep looking to see what more, we too, can do. This is an all hands on deck operation – one in which everyone needs to do his or her part.
Interventions like the ones that I have described in Kenema show that, with the right information and resources, we can slow the spread of this deadly virus. According to data from Sierra Leone’s health ministry, the number of new infections in the Kenema district declined every week of September. This really, really matters.
It is easy to lose sight of what the downward curve really means. It means children, women, and men who – because they were never infected in the first place – have the rest of their lives ahead of them. It means that even in an environment of fear and distrust, people can learn how to keep themselves and their loved ones healthy.
This is an especially important lesson as we witness the spread of fear here in the United States. The fear is understandable. People don’t want hospitals to treat the infected if they believe that health workers at those hospitals will get sick and themselves help spread the virus.
But we know how to care for people with Ebola safely and with compassion. We can give patients a fighting chance of surviving. We just need to ensure that doctors, nurses, and other health professionals get the right training – the training that the doctors and the nurses at Emory and Nebraska had when they successfully adhered to CDC protocols and safely treated those who came from West Africa and nursed them back to health safely.
In closing, one of the most important facts about the famine is that up to a million lives could have been saved. Food was exported from Ireland as people starved. I don’t have to tell this audience that. As a relief inspector wrote in 1846, “A woman with a dead child in her arms was begging in the street yesterday and the Guard of the Mail told me he saw a man with three dead children lying by the roadside. Notwithstanding all this distress, there was a market, plentifully supplied with meat, bread, and fish, – in short, everything.”
Today too, our world has everything that we need to curb the spread of the deadly virus of Ebola. And while it may not be around the corner in a market, we can get the necessary supplies to the infected communities. We can build the Ebola treatment units. We can supply the beds. We can train nurses and manufacture protective gear so that providing help – nursing people back to health – is not itself a perilous endeavor. We just need to act. We need to act more robustly and we need to act far more swiftly. We have the knowledge, we have the resources, and we have the capacity. It is on all of us to marshal the will and conquer the fear to enable us to use them.
Now, as then, hundreds of thousands of people’s lives are at stake. We cannot fail them. We must not fail them.
Thank you so much and thank you GOAL for having me with you this evening. Thank you.
