FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) – It was the new beginning that Sierra Leone’s first Ebola survivor, Victoria Yillia, had yearned for after losing 21 of her relatives to the disease: a newborn who would allow her and her husband to start a new family.
But only weeks after the baby they named Barnabas was born, he died of an infection that overwhelmed his tiny body. In the Ebola-ravaged community of Kenema, the baby who already had become a symbol of rebirth and renewal was buried on Thursday, a day after he died.
“Tears will never stop coming out of my eyes until the day I die, because that baby was everything in my life and a symbol for all my lost family members,” 21-year-old Yillia said in a telephone interview hours after her son’s funeral.
The baby’s name was freighted with meaning: Barnabas, from the Bible, often translates as the “son of encouragement.”
He was born on Aug. 9, and was discharged from Kenema’s hospital without any apparent health problems despite his mother’s near brush with death in the hospital’s Ebola ward one year earlier.