Imagine sending your child off to school knowing a handshake could be fatal. That is the heartbreaking reality for thousands of parents in eastern DR Congo this week.

As kids around the globe are digging out their new uniforms and lunchboxes, the back-to-school mood in the Democratic Republic of Congo could not be more different.

The country is in the grip of what authorities are now calling the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak it has ever seen. Government data puts confirmed cases at over 6,000 and the death toll has now crossed 2,950 — officially making it deadlier than the catastrophic 2018-2020 outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri which killed 2,299 people.

And yet, the school bell is ringing.

In Ituri Province, the current epicentre, more than 1,000 schools have been classified as being in the "red zone" — meaning active transmission. Parents are terrified, teachers are anxious, but education chiefs say they cannot afford to keep children at home indefinitely. During the West Africa outbreak in 2014, millions of children missed a full year of schooling.

So, how do you run a school during Ebola?

Gerlance Mahamba Mumbere, a school manager in Bunia, told cbinews.tv: "The children enter the classroom without shaking hands, the children avoid eating together, and neither the children nor the teachers touch each other. We have placed hand-washing stations in every corner of the classrooms, and there is no walking around during recess."

It is a whole new set of school rules. No touching. No sharing food. No playground milling. Just chlorine hand-wash buckets on every corner.

Parents are doing their bit at home too. Noëlla Mite Apesilam, a mum of three in Ituri, said: "In the morning, before they leave the house, I tell them not to shake hands at school, not to kiss each other, and to follow the safety guidelines. Here at home, it's mostly about handwashing, and I make them lemon water to drink throughout the day."

The fear is real, because the numbers are stark.

Some context you need to know:

This is not the DRC's first rodeo. In fact, Ebola was first discovered in the DRC — then Zaire — back in 1976 near the Ebola River, which gave the virus its name. The country has battled 15 outbreaks since then.

What makes this one different is the scale and the strain. While the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak was the biggest globally with over 11,000 deaths, the DRC's 2018-2020 Zaire-strain outbreak was its worst — until now. The previous record has already been shattered.

And there is a complicating factor: unlike the Zaire strain, which has an approved vaccine — Ervebo, trialled successfully in 2015 and used widely since — this current outbreak is driven by a strain with no licensed vaccine or treatment, which is why containment has been so difficult. Health workers are relying entirely on old-school barrier measures.

That is why community leaders are so insistent.

Michel Méta Wani, a civil society leader in Ituri working with the Ebola Response Team, explained: "We have schools with two hundred, three hundred, and even five hundred students each. And if we don't follow these measures, we may come to regret it, and that would be difficult for our children. But we hope that, as community leaders, we cannot accept the possibility that our children might die."

UNICEF says it is now working directly with the authorities to install prevention kits, train teachers and run awareness sessions in schools to stop transmission in classrooms.

It is a delicate balancing act — protecting education without risking lives. For now, in Bunia and beyond, lessons are going ahead, just with a lot more handwashing and a lot less hugging.

Source: cbinews.tv.

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