West Africa is about as far away from Australia as you can get. Yet the Ebola crisis centred around Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea has sown fear in Australians more than 15,000 kilometres away.
As the crisis spreads and the death toll surpassed 1000, I reached out to four recent graduates of the global health program I teach at the University of Sydney.
These four young women from Liberia and Sierra Leone came to Australia on Australian government scholarships to study and returned to their countries to build their health system and improve the lives of their countrymen and women – and now find themselves at the centre of this crisis.
Their responses show a resilience that is remarkable and inspiring. One noted that both countries endured more than a decade of civil war before securing peace and saw this epidemic as another challenge that the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone would overcome.