The husband of missionary Nancy Writebol, the Ebola patient who was flown from Liberia to Atlanta this week, says he is stunned by the reaction of many Americans who say Writebol should have stayed in Africa.
David Writebol is still in Liberia, where he was working with this wife and the Christian charity SIM USA to fight the Ebola epidemic.
“It’s just astonishing to see the reaction of people, and I think it exposes the underlying philosophy or worldview of the age, where an individual is of really no account,” Writebol says in a tape of a phone conversation with SIM President Bruce Johnson. SIM released the tape Thursday.
“And when somebody goes to extraordinary lengths and measures to minister to and perhaps help an individual, then that’s looked down upon,” Writebol said. “We’re losing our humanity. We’re losing the idea that human beings are created in the image of God and therefore inherentlly valuable.”
He continues: “It’s not just the ones in rich countries who have that status, that are valuable . . . the billions of people that are living in abject poverty and suffering, who have no hope, when someone does something to reach or to save one of them, they are doing no less and no different than trying to reach or save somebody who might be in the upper strata.”
Writebol says on the tape that he is well and staying in a small apartment, “where I spend a lot of time pacing around the floors.”
He said he receives updates on his wife’s condition from his son, Jeremy, who is in Atlanta near his mother, and from the Emory University Hospital medical team treating her.
“I’m grateful and happy that she is in a place that enables her to receive the best care possible and that will give her every opportunity to get better, “ Writebol said.
Earlier in the tape, Writebol talks about the attitudes of some who criticize the aid workers in West Africa, and he strikes a parallel between the aid workers and Jesus Christ.
“How could these missionaries be so foolish, or worse, in putting hemselves in danger – that, they (get) whatever they deserve – but to put everybody else in danger by going there,” he says, voicing the complaints of Stateside critics. “But it’s that very calling, that very sending, that every going that demonstrates the characteristics, the great things that Christ has done for humanity. He left heaven and he came to a place of suffering and trouble and went about doing good.”
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