These days, coronavirus is spreading across the globe. As of any world nation, Ethiopia has been exerting efforts to combat and resist the pandemic. Even the nation was playing the leading role in the continent in organizing human and material preparations before the pandemic gets its foothold. Conducting cooperation with various countries and international organizations are among the preparations to get PPEs and technical support.
However, despite this fact, the pandemic is surging in Ethiopia reaching over 4,000 cases and killing over 70. Among others, hesitations to apply restrictions mainly related to social distancing and lack of proper usage of facial masks are mentioned as the major problems to the expansion of the epidemic. Furthermore, low awareness of frequent sanitation with water and soap can be also an additional cause of the spreading of the virus.
Of course, an uneasy number of citizens had not had such a proper and frequent sanitation tradition due to various reasons. Individuals among the society especially who live in the rural area traditionally apply poor or no hand washing when they serve a meal in the course of farming.
Low awareness, shortage of water, and hesitancy are among the reasons. Even these days, some individuals in rural Ethiopia have not accessed to clean water, unaware or reluctant to use river water with soap to sanitize their hands frequently. Therefore, they easily get vulnerable to various diseases. The problem might get worsen in a situation when a pandemic occurred in these areas where the society does not develop a culture of proper sanitation.
Not only this, parents traditionally increase intimacy with their children or any member of their family during bad times. They try to show their sympathy and belongingness with physical proximity to the patient whether the disease is communicable or not.
It is common to see mothers embracing their sick child to cherish compassion. They used to address a prayer to be in the position of their beloved ones wishing for inheriting the disease so that their child will get healthy. They call it Melabes, a tradition where mothers bend to their sick child and beseech to God to make the disease to them on behalf of the patient. Such extreme sympathy or sacrifice is usually taken as an expression of love.
Similarly, turning the face back to a sick person is taboo. Contrary to other cultures, distancing oneself from a person who sneeze or cough used to label someone as a bad person. Instead, it is common to lend hands to a patient even in a way the disease can be transmitted.
In the same token, a patient won’t reveal his pain. Ask someone sick in the hospital, and then wait for his answer. It is pretty sure that he will say he is fine even if his health condition is visibly worsening. Not only in the countryside, even in urban areas are some citizens reluctant to go to hospitals or to ask for help unless their health condition extremely gets exacerbated. It seems the excessive social bond in the culture makes the individuals more exclusive to express their pain. Or it is the collective culture that let these individuals get mysterious about their personal affairs as the culture is mostly unfamiliar to privacy terms.
In any case, individuals used to interrogate other’s health condition whether the responder hides them or not. Then they try to help a patient either in traditional or modern medical treatment. In this regard, cooperation is the good aspect of the collective culture that enables the people living in underdeveloped countries to help each other and fill the gap that the individualistic culture is replacing it with technology.
However, cooperation also gets bad during the occurrence of such a pandemic, as the culture is difficult to avoid intimacy. It obliges everyone to close to the people they love although they know that is not good for their health. The individualistic culture teaches people to keep a distance from the patient to reduce transmission. However, the opposite is true to the collective ones. Therefore it will increase the number of cases in the same infection.
In other ways, people might get hesitant to reveal themselves as infected ones. And they do not get cautious to keep a distance from others. Thus they easily transmit the disease. The poor economy is another problem to the spread of a communicable disease like coronavirus as it let many to use public transport sardining within the crowd.
On the other hand, behavioral change takes a long time. Improving sanitation, social distancing, and proper usage of masks that are new to the public need time to be habitual and to get functional in such tough times. In this regard, monitoring and enforcing laws along with the state of emergency can help the nation to reduce the number of new cases.
The good thing is the pandemic can help to improve these cultural limitations emanated from extreme compassion. Now, the major two merits that Ethiopians might experience from the epidemic are developing a culture of proper sanitation and social distancing. Today many people are making a behavioral change in improving sanitation and social distancing especially following the increasing number of new cases.
Therefore, encouraging the people to develop the culture of appropriate sanitation using water and soap is important to reduce the spreading of the pandemic. In addition, creating awareness rising is significant to enforce people to apply social distancing in order to avert the expansion of the disease. In relation to this, it is also important to leave shoes outside. Such cautions ought to be repeatedly told to the public as they are important to avert disease by cutting their transmission. As a nation that has poor health facilities and economy, the country has been working on healthcare activities focusing mainly on prevention mechanisms. This will help citizens to stay safe and avert possible health costs that might be even incomparable to their income. Therefore, all stakeholders ought to work closely in implementing and monitoring prevention mechanisms so as to keep the health of the people relying on the unwavering basis.
The Ethiopian Herald June 23/2020
BY YOHANES JEMANEH
