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SALT LAKE CITY – A Utahn trying to help Ebola-stricken people in Liberia is coming home.
She says fear about Ebola here in the United States has wrecked West Africa.
“We need people to come, but people can’t go back and spend 21 days in quarantine,” Karen Mathot said. “That would probably prohibit a lot of people from volunteering to come out here.”
The founder of “Lifting Liberia” tells KSL Newsradio’s Doug Wright that she’s been heartbroken, unable to hold the kids who lost their parents to Ebola, because only survivors can do that.
“This boy was walking around, hysterically crying, and there were other kids crying,” she said. “Your natural instinct is to pick up a child and comfort him, and you can’t do that.”
Mathot says even survivors are shunned and stigmatized.
“Many of them contracted Ebola while caring for a loved one. Now, they’re kind of isolated as well.”
Mathot has been trying to set up psycho-social treatment for kids in transit homes.
“Play therapy, sand therapy, just to be able to talk because the post-traumatic stress is going to come out years from now,” she said. “Then, Liberia is going to have a whole other set of problems.”
Mathot is believed to be the second Utahn returning from the Ebola zone. More than 4,900 hundred people have died from the virus that has also sickened double that amount.
