The excerpt below is stranger than fiction:
“Guys please stop asking if I have Ebola. I do not have it. But I thank you for caring about my health and wellbeing :-) Dele.” But some fans refused to take the former Birmingham City player’s hint. Twitter user Michael McGuinness wrote: “I’m sorry to hear that Dele had-Ebola.” The striker replied: “I think I’ve made it quite clear I do not have Ebola pal.” This morning Adebola wrote: “Why are people tweeting me #PrayForDele? There’s nothing wrong with me guys :-) use your prayers to good effect.”
Much worse to come
Urging governments to avoid panic and fear, UN chief Ban Ki-moon announced plans in August to step up the global response to the Ebola outbreak and bring it under control. "We need to avoid panic and fear," Ban told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.
But reporting from Abidjan in September, the AFP’s Joris Fioriti wrote that Sierra Leonean footballers were “aggrieved by their Ebola pariah status.”
“Sierra Leone's footballers are motivated by a sense of betrayal by fellow Africans over the Ebola virus that has led to a near pariah status and forced them to play all their games away from home,” explained Fioriti in his article excerpted below:
“Only players based outside Sierra Leone were allowed into Ivory Coast for the Africa Cup of Nations qualifying game in Abidjan on Saturday. And it was only under a threat of being expelled from the competition that the host authorities permitted the game to go ahead.
“The Ivorians attitude to the plight of their fellow Africans has deeply upset the Sierra Leone Stars. Many African governments have sought to isolate Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the worst hit countries, including their sports men and women.
"The way we are treated is like we don't belong to the African planet," Jabbie Kahalifa told the AFP reporter. Jabbie who plays for Turkish championship side Balikesirspor also said:
"People don't even want to see us. The way they treat us when we go to airports ... as soon as you say 'I'm from Sierra Leone', it's like I'm from an alien planet."
"People start pushing themselves away," he told AFP. "It's embarrassing to us Africans to be treating another African that type of way. It's just hard to take sometimes. You reach a point like, I'm about to lose it. We feel alone, like the whole African continent turned their back against us. This is not how things should be done."
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