ST. LOUIS — “Ebola is real!” says the hand-drawn flier.
Simple pictures of monkeys, bush meat, hugs and handshakes are covered with X’s — indicating ways to prevent spread of the deadly virus.
Communication “needs to be that simple: a monkey with an X on it,” says Wendy Saul, a literacy expert and professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
Liberia’s literacy levels are so low, communication must be swift and easy to understand for adults and children in the west African country fighting the Ebola epidemic.
Saul visited Liberia in January as president of the International Book Bank, which supplies new books to impoverished countries. She’d collected literacy tests that her students at UMSL helped compare to previous evaluations. But signs of improvement were soon squashed by other news.
Ebola broke out in Liberia two months later. Schools are closed and families are quarantined. The crisis isn’t helped by the fact that residents, many of whom are uneducated and survivors of the country’s civil wars, distrust the government and sometimes health workers.
“Literacy impacts how you live a life, not just how you do in school,” said Saul.
The Ebola disaster has many components, but the International Book Bank is working to help with one:
“There is another Ebola crisis that people aren’t thinking about — the long-term crisis,” Saul said.
So her group, along with other nonprofits such as the We-Care Foundation, hope to put together boxes of books for students in especially poor areas of Liberia. In with the books will also be fliers about Ebola, pencils and copybooks.
We-Care’s director, Michael Weah, has written that not only will packages help with learning, they will give “younger ones the opportunity to ‘draw their experiences,’ a method of psycho-social counseling used in dealing with traumatized kids.”
