The hashtag #IamLiberianNotAVirus has spread throughout the online community over the last 24 hours as people have come together to challenge the stigmatization that West Africans are facing as the Ebola crisis continues to grow.
The innovative campaign started when Shoana Solomon’s nine-year-old daughter returned home from her US school and told her mum about some of the things other children were saying.
Solomon recently moved with her family from Liberia’s capital Monrovia to the US and has faced on-going stigmatization.
The recent death of Liberian-American Thomas Edward Duncan, the only person so far to die of Ebola on American soil, has only fuelled the levels of fear within the US and the as a result the discrimination faced by Liberians in particular.
Solomon however is conscious of this fear and is careful not to undermine this genuine concern. She told the Guardian newspaper, “Don’t get me wrong: I’m afraid. Ebola is a serious thing. I don’t want to minimise that. But there has to be some sensitivity. We have been through so much as a country: first our 14-year civil war, and now Ebola – the stigmatisation is just too much.”
The campaign has spread throughout the world as Liberians have started sharing photographs of themselves holding the message ‘I am a Liberian Not a Virus’.
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