“Your mission is to proceed up the Highway N1 in an embassy SUV. Pick up Ebola’s path at Gueckedou, follow it and learn what you can along the way. When you find the Ebola, infiltrate it’s team by whatever means available and terminate the it’s command.”
Okay, those weren’t the orders we’d been given, but they weren’t that far off. It was the fall of 2014, Ebola was raging all over Guinea and our Ambassador had sent me and one of our Diplomatic Security Agents to the Forest Region of Guinea—the area of the country where Ebola was most rampant and where communications were poor—in order to determine the security situation on the ground.
I was no stranger to overland travel in Africa at this point—I’d visited 17 or 18 countries, I’d done long road trips in Senegal, Tanzania, and South Africa, and I’d traveled all over Cameroon. But this would be the longest road trip I ever did in Africa—over 1,200 miles total. But all of that doesn’t make this the photo of the year for 2014 for me.
Rather it’s what this image conveys—if anyone ever asked what driving long distances in Africa was like, I think this image tells the story better than I could do if I tried to describe it myself.
