For Ebola victim, US trip followed years of effort
DALLAS (AP) — Thomas Eric
Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, grew up
next to a leper colony in Liberia and fled years of war before later
returning to his country to find it ravaged by the disease that
ultimately took his life.
Duncan, 42,
arrived in Dallas in late September, realizing a long-held ambition to
join relatives. He came to attend the high-school graduation of his son,
who was born in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast and was brought to the
U.S. as a toddler when the boy's mother successfully applied for
resettlement.
"His son had
told his mother, 'I want to see my dad. Can we help my dad to come?' And
they fixed his papers to come to this country," said Duncan's brother
Wilfred Smallwood, whose son, Oliver Smallwood, is quarantined with the
household that hosted Duncan before he was diagnosed.
The trip was
the culmination of decades of effort, friends and family members said.
But when Duncan arrived in Dallas, though he showed no symptoms, he had
already been exposed to Ebola. His neighbors in Liberia believe Duncan
become infected when he helped a pregnant neighbor who later died from
it. It was unclear if he knew about her diagnosis before traveling.
Duncan's life reflected the hardships of many Liberians who fled or endured the country's 14 years of civil war.
He
grew up in a village near the Yila Mission, an American Baptist mission
hospital and leper colony, according to a lifelong friend, Thomas
Kwenah. Duncan later moved to a middle-class area in Monrovia for high
school, according to a friend from that time, Tonia Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, who now lives in Calverton, Maryland, called Duncan a "dutiful" young man who was "like a brother."
Duncan was 18 when warlord
Charles Taylor invaded Liberia from Ivory Coast, initiating years of
conflict. Duncan's half-sister, Mai Wureh, had arrived in the U.S. with
her husband in 1989, shortly before Taylor's invasion, and helped her
family apply for resettlement — but the application was denied.
"Mai had filed for us to leave the war zone, but after a long time, the U.S. rejected all of us," Smallwood said.
Duncan,
Smallwood and other family members fled in the opposite direction from
Taylor, to a refugee camp outside the Ivorian border city of Danane. It
was there that Duncan met Louise Troh.
"We all lived in Ivory Coast in the refugee camp, and by 1994, they were boyfriend and girlfriend," Kwenah said.
When
Troh's resettlement application was approved, she took along the
couple's 3-year-old son, Karsiah, but Duncan's visa applications were
denied. Along with relatives, Duncan migrated from Danane to Buduburam, a
sprawling, city-like refugee camp in Ghana.
A friend who met him there, Wilmot Chayee, said the two spent hours playing basketball or watching professional soccer.
When
the camp closed in 2013, Duncan returned to Liberia, to the same area
where he'd attended high school — now a slum wracked by poverty and
disease — and into a small room in a private home, Wureh said. He took a
job with Safeway Cargo, FedEx's shipper in Liberia, as the general
manager's chauffeur.
But a year later, he was summoned to the U.S.
Duncan had recently confided, Kwenah said, that he "wanted to marry that girl in Dallas."
Duncan
arrived at Troh's apartment on Sept. 20 — less than a week after
helping his sick neighbor. For the nine days before he was taken to a
hospital in an ambulance, Duncan shared the apartment with several
people.
"We thought that because he was in America, he was safe, that he would be the one Liberian to survive," Kwenah said.
Duncan's
family visited him at the hospital and glimpsed him using a camera
system, but said they had declined to do so again because it was too
upsetting.
Karsiah Duncan was unable to visit Duncan at the hospital Tuesday evening, Troh said, and so never saw his father again.
By EMILY SCHMALL
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