Navy Cmdr. James Lawler (right) a member of the Department of Defense (DoD) medical support team training, leads a group of students in removing their personal protective equipment during training at the San Antonio Military Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas on October 24, 2014.
On Wednesday morning, Time honored the men and women who dedicated themselves to serving patients diagnosed with Ebola despite the risks. The Time “Person of the Year” for 2014 is the Ebola fighters.
Nancy Gibbs explained the reason for the selection on the publication’s website; the hero’s heart was largely emphasized. These Ebola fighters, according to Gibbs, had a hero’s courage by exposing themselves to the virus for the sake of helping others.
“Ask what drove them and some talk about God; some about country; some about the instinct to run into the fire, not away,” she wrote.
This past year, Ebola affected the entirety of the world; it grabbed headlines for months on end and initiated a global fear. Those who fought against this epidemic had no guarantee of safety. The article mentioned the name of a few of these workers.
An ambulance driver named Foday Gallah, who “survived infection,” attributed his immunity to God. He called it a “holy gift.”
Salome Karwah, a nurse’s assistant for MSF, lost both her parents in a week due to the virus and contracted the virus herself.
“It comes with so much pain, and it causes so much pain that you can feel it deep in your bones,” she described her experience as an Ebola victim to The Guardian back in October.
After recovering from the disease, Karwah began helping MSF and claimed, “It looked like God gave me a second chance to help others.”
Dr. Kent Brantly was also noted. Dr. Brantly is a doctor with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization dedicated to serving those in need, and contracted the Ebola virus while serving in West Africa. Upon recovery, he donated his blood plasma to several Ebola patients in the United States; they were healed through his donation.
“I still have the same flaws that I did before,” he told Time. “But whenever we go through a devastating experience like what I’ve been through, it is an incredible opportunity for redemption of something. We can say, How can I be better now because of what I’ve been through? To not do that is kind of a shame.”
Gibbs described the brave actions of other health care workers throughout the piece, and described the need for “us” to discard our apathy for diseases in “faraway places.”
“The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight. For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year,” wrote Gibbs.
