The Intercultural Center hosted an event yesterday called “Ebola: It’s Our Crisis,” which focused on the recent epidemic in Western Africa. The speakers also looked at the social epidemic of stigmatizing those from the countries or continents with infected populations as automatically being infected by the virus as a result of being from a country afflicted by it.

The event was mostly discussion based and was led by Nadege Seppou ’15 and Rima Tahini ’16, both international students. Seppou is from Cameroon and Tahini is from Sierra Leone, one of the three main Western African countries affected by Ebola. The duo presented a PowerPoint that featured pictures of Seppou and Rima, as well as other international students, holding signs that said things like, “I am Sierra Leonean, not a virus.” The other countries on the slide included Guinea and Liberia, both of which are greatly affected by the Ebola epidemic along.

Both University President Frederick Lawrence and Dean of Students Jamele Adams were present at the event. Lawrence compared the current issue of labeling citizens as viruses to calling those who suffer from epilepsy epileptics.

He said, “If we change the vocabulary that we use, we can change our own minds. People do terrible things out of fear and ignorance and not realize that they are only worsening and contributing the problem rather than solving it.”

The question then to keep in mind, according to Lawrence, is how to handle the fear and how to approach educating those who are ignorant to the issue.

The next segment of the event focused on the facts of Ebola, or as Seppou and Tahini put it, “the realities on the ground.” They showed a video titled Ebola: Waiting, which focused on the claim that the world waited too long to react to the Ebola epidemic. It showed individual people waiting, looking into the camera as music played in the background and a screen with the sentence “This is what waiting looks like.” The video featured stars such as Morgan Freeman and Connie Britton. It ended with a black screen and the words “We can’t wait to stop crises like Ebola. Talk is cheap,” and then gave the address for a website to donate to the cause.

Seppour and Tahini focused the discussion following the video on the notion of prevention and the fact that Ebola could have been prevented even though it is deadly.

Tahini posed the question, “Why had the disease been able to thrive? Why did it spiral out of control so rapidly?” Adams responded, “As I get older, I think of moments of history of when a virus is created and applied to a group of people. When AIDS was first discovered, it was connected to black people and then gay people, and eventually the world came to the conclusion that it didn’t just affect one group of people. We spend a lot of time trying to place blame rather than working to solve the problem.”

Tahini explained a little bit about the background and discussed the effects of cultural and economic factors in relation to why the disease has spread so rapidly. They showed a video titled Five Facts You Should Know About the Ebola Virus. The video described the current epidemic as “the worst outbreak of Ebola” ever and said that in order to prevent the further spread of the virus, individual communities are now being quarantined. The video also stated that the current virus is a known quantity, the Zaire strain, and that it is not likely to change. After showing the video, Seppou said, “There are multiple factors that contribute to an enormous crisis like the current one, from a corrupt leader remaining in power to improper allocation of resources. It’s imperative that the global community comes together to help.”

The discussion continued to focus on the types of social and cultural implications that occur as a result of the Ebola crisis. This portion of the discussion essentially served to tackle the idea that was described by Sappou and Tahini as “If you’re black, you come from Africa, and if you come from Africa, you must have Ebola.” Several audience members said that they felt that “this was a pervasive idea and that it reflected the general population’s idea that Africans are an inferior race.” Adams added that he felt that within the context of the Ebola crisis, the idea of the white doctor saving the black savages was evident and was the same idea that ultimately led to the enslavement of Africans centuries ago.

Tahini briefly shared a personal experience of being an international student at Brandeis. She said, “When people first meet you, they ask you where you’re from. The automatic follow up question is then how long have you been here. Things like that only add to the stigma that Africans in this country face every day.”

Seppou concluded by adding, “I believe and I hope that in the future people will take an informed stand on what’s going on the world.”