On their first stop to distribute supplies in Mweka, a district which is in the epicenter of the recent Ebola outbreak, the IRC team arrives at the Nsungi Munene health centre. It is nothing more than a ramshackle hut with a tin roof. In the health centers, the IRC distributed replacement mattresses and bicycles, used by local health workers in their surveillance of potential carriers and new cases of Ebola.

As the team continues to the village of Kalombayi, IRC driver Kennedy Kabamba battles his way through a swampy track. The road was recently re-opened to allow access the Ebola-stricken communities. This part of the district is diamond mining country and along the road there is a steady stream of men, women and children with spades and sieves searching for diamonds in the forest.

When the team finally arrives in Kalombayi, Kennedy unloads bicycles from the roof of “Mobile 20,” one of the IRC’s beat-up four-wheel-drives. A huge crowd soon circles the car, singing, dancing and shaking the team’s hands. “Some of the children were really scared, it seems that they had never seen a car or a ‘mutoke’ - a white person - before,” Fergus Thomas recalls.

As the team continues to Mweka, the district capital, the rear axle on the IRC’s four-wheel drive breaks. Toto Mbuyamba, an IRC driver and mechanic, starts to work out a temporary solution to the problem while Kennedy takes a mango break.

In Mweka town, IRC teams distribute mattresses in the local hospital. Because the Ebola virus can continue to be active in clothing or other textiles that have been in contact with a victim, all the mattresses in the hospitals of the affected communities had to be replaced. IRC teams also distributed new mattresses to families who have lost members to the disease. Many of these families are so poor they do not destroy mattresses which came into contact with infected people.

On the road from the villages of Kampungu to Baka Tombe in Mweka district, the IRC convoy runs into more trouble. Even though engineers from Médecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) had worked to reopen these roads leading to the villages worst hit by Ebola, the IRC vehicles got frequently stuck in the mud. These roads become muddy rivers in the torrential rain. And in order to cut through the thick forest, IRC teams travel with machetes and saws to clear fallen debris.

IRC teams distributed bars of disinfectant soap among affected communities. At Kampungu primary school in Mweka, students also received a hygiene promotion workshop. Across the affected area, the IRC distributed more than 11,000 bars of soap to school children in 72 hours.

Dieudonné Bumba, an IRC administrator, organized a military-style soap distribution, transforming a playground of hundreds of unruly children into neat lines of students who answered to their names in the role call. Three days of this ‘campaign’ ensured that the IRC teams had covered all of the schools within the zone affected by the outbreak.

In the makeshift departure lounge at the Luebo landing strip south of Mweka, Fergus Thomas and his team are the last IRC group to leave the Ebola-affected area. “Amazed that there is a mobile network available, we called home to say that the little Cessna plane is on its way to bring us back to the district capital Kananga,” Fergus recalls. “We were tired and very happy to have been able to work with the communities and with other NGOs to make a difference."

(December 2007) September 2007 saw an outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus in the southern province of Kasai Occidental in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ebola virus, spread through contact with infected people, often proves fatal within two to three days and there is no vaccine or treatment for the disease. Within days of the outbreak, IRC teams were on the ground, providing logistical support and much-needed supplies to the Congolese ministry of health, as well as training health staff and communities in areas bordering the outbreak zone. The IRC’s provincial coordinator in the Kasai capital Kananga, Fergus Thomas, led a team across the affected area, distributing supplies.