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HOLDEN, Mbad. – Almost five years have pbaded since he almost died of Ebola in Liberia, but Richard Sacra has never failed in his commitment to the nation. West Africa in trouble.
The Mbadachusetts family doctor, aged 56, was part of a handful of Americans treated and cured of the Ebola virus during the deadly outbreak of 2014 in West Africa. This is the worst epidemic ever, occurring in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
Sacra contracted the virus while giving birth at ELWA, a mission hospital located in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, where he had been working for more than two decades. He was evacuated and treated in Omaha, Nebraska, but a few months later, Sacra was back in ELWA – which means "Eternal Love Winning Africa" - treating patients.
The fervent Christian, who says he has dreamed of becoming a missionary since childhood, has not stopped coming back since.
"It's our country of adoption," Sacra said Wednesday, as his wife Debbie and himself took a rare break at home in Worcester, Mbadachusetts, where he is a faculty professor. of Medicine from the University of Mbadachusetts. "My wife and I have been going to Liberia since 1987. Our kids grew up there, so the idea of not going there would be harder for me than going back."
Sacra was honored Thursday by the African Mission Healthcare Foundation for his work in Liberia, a nation founded in the 19th century as a colony of freed African-American slaves.
The organization awarded him the Chaim Award for outstanding Christian medical missionary service at a ceremony in New York. The annual prize includes a $ 500,000 gift.
Sacra said that this money would be used at ELWA to build an intensive care unit, install solar panels and set up a training program for family doctors, which he had founded in 2017. This hospital of 107 beds was founded in 1965 and is managed by SIM. Christian evangelical organization based in North Carolina.
The increase in the number of family doctors is a minor but crucial element of the country's reconstruction, which had never fully recovered from more than a decade of civil war before the epidemic Ebola, said Sacra.
"The Ebola crisis has particularly highlighted the weakness of the health system in Liberia, the whole system collapsed because there were too few doctors and qualified nurses," he said. . "One of our goals as a mission is to strengthen this health system – not just to bring doctors in, but to train local doctors and build their capacity so that it does not happen again. "
The Ebola virus has continued to spread in other parts of Africa, particularly in Congo, where more than 300 people have died since last summer. But Sacra thinks that Liberia is better prepared than it was five years ago.
More and more doctors are coming out of local medical programs, the national government has put in place a public health surveillance and education system, and an experimental Ebola vaccine is being tested.
"Building a health system from scratch is not something you can do in a year or two," Sacra said. "It's a long-time project."
Sacra says her three sons, age 20 and starting their own careers, are committed to participating in these efforts in the near future.
"We are just grateful that God has given us a second chance to continue to make an impact," he said.
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This story was corrected to show that Sierra Leone, not Ghana, was one of the major countries affected by the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
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