What's new

i i

Ten-year-old Saah Exco was found on a beach in Liberia's West Point slum, abandoned and naked, a likely an Ebola victim. Our photographer made a picture and hoped the child would recover. A day later, the boy died. David Gilkey/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Gilkey/NPR

Ten-year-old Saah Exco was found on a beach in Liberia's West Point slum, abandoned and naked, a likely an Ebola victim. Our photographer made a picture and hoped the child would recover. A day later, the boy died.

David Gilkey/NPR

Her eyes met the camera. She was there. And yet she wasn't there.

That's how NPR photographer Dave Gilkey remembers the moment when he took a picture of Baby Sesay, a 45-year-old traditional healer in a village in Sierra Leone. She'd tried to cure a sick little boy. The boy died of Ebola. Now she had fallen ill herself and was in a community care center in the village of Royail in Sierra Leone, where people suspected of having the virus can stay until test results came back. She stood alone behind a fence. Gilkey was standing about 15 feet away.

Two days later, Gilkey learned that Baby Sesay had died.

What were you feeling when you took that photograph?

She's staring right toward me, but her eyes clearly are looking somewhere else. One of the weird things in covering Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone is that you don't see a lot of suspected cases. This was really someone who had Ebola staring you right in the eye.

And that was very unusual.

Why don't you see a lot of suspected cases?

When they're at a point when they've fallen that ill, you don't have access to them. Normally they're either at home or behind tarp fencing at a holding facility. There was a little tiny break in the fence and she happened to be standing there. We just happened to walk up to the wrong place at the wrong time, if you want to call it that.

Did you ever think maybe you shouldn't be taking her picture?

I only took a few pictures, I guess I felt sort of ... I don't how to describe it, I felt like I wanted her to not be standing there.

But I also feel like look, this is what Ebola does to you and this is something that maybe we need to see. We see survivor pictures. We see the dead. But very rarely do you see someone clearly being affected by Ebola.

Did you think she was going to die?

We all felt like she was in a place where there was at least a possibility she was going to get help. You always leave [these situations] with hope that people are going to be okay. But 48 hours later, Ebola got her. This is the second time this has happened [in covering Ebola]. In Liberia, I photographed a little boy and found out a day later he had died.

Goats and Soda

Reporting On Ebola: An Abandoned 10-Year-Old, A Nervous Neighborhood

Are you sorry you took the picture?

Look, I just feel horrible that that was the outcome. I don't regret taking the picture. I feel it's important for people to see what's going on in Sierra Leone. And right now Ebola is really surging in the capital and the rural areas to the north.

In the radio report by your colleague Nurith Aizenman, Baby Sesay says, "My body weak, I have a headache."' Then Aizenman describes what happened: "For several seconds, she's rigid, hands locked on [a] pole, eyes wide and frozen, breathing heavily."

A Deadly Chain: Tracing Ebola In A Sierra Leone Village

4 min 45 sec

Add to Playlist

Download

The poor woman's about to collapse. The natural response is to jump over the fence and give her a hand, and yet you just can't do that. You really feel helpless here on a lot of levels. We did immediately cut the interview short and urged the man running the facility to tell her to go back inside and lie down

Have there been other assignments where you photographed someone who died soon after?

Yes, in military situations. But not in a way where it seems so personal. Because she was staring at me.

Sierra Leone

ebola