Back to School

This year schools in Sierra Leone are on the post-Ebola fast track timetable, so when we visited the Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial junior secondary school Young Writers club today they were beginning the second term of the 2014-2015 school year, instead of starting a new school year.

It isn't easy for either the students or the teachers to adjust to the pace. We see the effect of this in the clubs, too. Still, before long everyone was settled down working at their own stage on their own topics. 

Writing Back

Happy New Year, everyone! SELI would like to thank each and every individual person who has contributed to its efforts in the past year. We are so indebted to you!

Ebola has hampered our activities in the past six months—and this is only an understatement of what being out of school for an entire school year has done to a whole nation of students. We live every minute of every day hoping that the Ebola infection rate will subside soon and desist from taking its terrible toll in Sierra Leone. 

SELI has begun a new Seli River Writing Project called Writing Back. Its purpose is to restart the writing activity of as many junior and senior secondary members of SELI’s Young Writers clubs as we can during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Because schools are closed, the conditions under which these clubs normally operate—the school settings, the workshop-style meetings, the box of supplies, and each person’s files of ongoing work—are currently unavailable.  Yet we’ll be writing to each other, and writing back. Watch the blog, and we’ll be giving you more information as it evolves!

Modeling the Ebola Outbreak

This video is a great explanation of what is happening in the Sierra Leone Ebola outbreak, and what some of our alternatives are.

The author, Sibyl Harleston, presents the mechanics of how EVD is spread, ways to interpret the results that models present, and suggestions for slowing the transmission rates.

You Can't Talk to Ebola

Always rifle-shaped, the virus

used to ride on scowls.

Came in clusters piled snarling

on roofs and backs of trucks.

Shoulder-butted. Ready-charged.

We've come. Hand over your youth

or yield to our torch.

I'd greet them;

hail one, and they'd all turn,

distracted.

How's your mother?

Did the tablets ease her pain?

Mock their faces—

what frowns!

We've no food, sir.

They'd reach for my gifts and leave,

all those long gray barrels

resting on their knees.

And the virus

adapted. Barreled still, but earless,

piggybacking on smiles.

On children come to plead.

We love them,

we feed them.

And then we're cracked apart.

Our slain youth here, now,

wait for transport, laid out

upon the hearth.

© 2014 Jacqueline Leigh

Action Against Ebola

One of SELI's principal donors, Edward Davies & Associates Consulting Engineers Ltd, is taking action against Ebola. We're glad to be partnered with them: along with being a health crisis, Ebola is a humanitarian and educational crisis.

Won't you help to fight Ebola?