Epidemic by Reid Wilson

Author:Reid Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

THIRTEEN

Dallas

FOR YEARS, THOMAS ERIC DUNCAN languished, alone, thousands of miles from his family, the woman he loved, and the son he hadn’t seen grow up.

Duncan had been one of hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled Liberia’s deadly civil war in the 1990s, forced out of his own home and into a squalid refugee camp across the border in Ivory Coast. He had tried to start over, living with his brother in a tent. The two young men befriended the woman who lived in the tent next door, Louise Troh; Duncan fell in love. Amid the poverty of years in the camp, Troh and Duncan had a son, Karsiah, in 1995.

Everyone in the camp longed for a visa to the United States, a veritable golden ticket that held the promise of a new life on American shores, far away from the violence and poverty of the home they no longer knew. Troh and Karsiah won the lottery in the late 1990s; Duncan, who had never married his partner, was left behind. He spent another decade and a half in the camp, where he learned French, Ivory Coast’s official language.

Finally, in 2013, Duncan, still yearning for a ticket to America, felt it was safe enough to return home to Liberia. He moved into an apartment and got a job as a driver for a FedEx contractor. Louise had moved to the Dallas area, where Karsiah had grown up as a promising student, a high school quarterback who won admission to a college in San Antonio.

Then, Duncan’s luck seemed to change. One day the phone rang at the home of Wilfred Smallwood, the brother who had shared Duncan’s tent in the refugee camp and who now lived in Phoenix: “I got my visa! I got my visa!” Duncan shouted, ecstatic.1 His life seemed to be moving again; he and Troh would be married when he arrived, his son thrilled with anticipation at the prospect of seeing his father once again. Troh helped him book his plane ticket, from Monrovia through Brussels, then to Washington and on to Dallas.

In the days before his plane left, a young woman named Marthalene Williams needed his help. Williams, the daughter of Duncan’s landlord, was pregnant. She was also sick. Duncan, the landlord, and the landlord’s son piled into a taxi with the young woman, bound for Monrovia’s main hospital, and the nation’s largest Ebola ward. Duncan later said he believed she was miscarrying; he didn’t know she had the virus that was raging through his country.2

But the hospital had no room. Like so many others who were suffering, Williams was turned away. They got back into the taxi, and Duncan carried her into her own apartment. Williams, her brother, and her father would all be dead within a few days.

On September 19, Duncan arrived at Monrovia’s airport. Asked whether he had been in contact with anyone who had Ebola, Duncan said no. Whether his omission of the young pregnant woman was a lie or whether he truly did not know she was sick remains unclear.

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