Growing up in Pueblo, Colo., with a single mother, Eric Talbert never thought he’d go to college, let alone direct a nonprofit organization providing medical care to civilian victims of war.
But, as Talbert says, life had other plans for him.
“It’s been a wild ride, as they say,” Talbert says. The Colorado native is the executive director for EMERGENCY USA, the American component of a global network of NGOs that bring high-quality, free medical and surgical assistance to war victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Sudan. In the wake of the Ebola crisis — in which Sierra Leone has suffered the worst of any country — EMERGENCY USA has opened two clinics in Sierra Leone dedicated to treating patients with Ebola, many who have survived the virus.
But 20-some years ago, Talbert was studying electronics at Redstone College in Broomfield, Colo.
“I grew up doing construction work. I had a paper route — technical school was kind of the furthest I thought I would go,” Talbert says.
“I would say the major change for me was my best friend from high school, Mike, was in a bad motorcycle accident and ended up with a traumatic brain injury, and I was there and experienced that with him — the recovery and all of that,” he says. “And that experience, on many different levels, profoundly changed my life and direction.”
Talbert spent a year devoting his free time to supporting Mike through the first steps of his recovery — the accident left Mike blind and dealing with a number of other physical and social issues, which Talbert says led to an interest in learning about how brain injuries affect people. When he wasn’t spending time with Mike, Talbert was working full-time and going to night school. He eventually left Colorado to attend the University of Las Vegas, where he studied cognitive psychology and cultural anthropology.
From Las Vegas, Talbert traveled to Brooklyn where he got a job at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, working in a research lab building databases on brain waves. It was in New York in 2004 when Talbert met Gino Strada, founder of the original EMERGENCY organization in Milan, Italy. Strada was on tour for his latest book, Green Parrots: A War Surgeon’s Diary.
“As far as I know, [being a war surgeon] was never part of his plan,” Talbert says. “His training was in cardiac surgery and lung transplant, but it was one of those things — after school he signed up for six months with the Red Cross and then spent eight years working in all of these areas of conflict, treating civilians, everyday people like you and I who were trying to get by, who were injured by land mines, who were injured by bullets, by bombs, by the structural violence that war creates for everybody. We don’t often hear about this. We always hear about the two sides that are fighting. We don’t hear about this third section that is us, the civilians it has an impact on.”
By the time he met Strada, Talbert was working as an assistant for an independent consultant for nonprofit organizations in New York. It was this work that gave Talbert his first immersion in philanthropic work and nonprofit management.
“The fact that EMERGENCY was building and running high-standard hospitals in war zones and all the services were free of charge blew me away,” Talbert says. “I found by hearing [Strada] speak, reading his book and learning more about his organization, I really wanted to help out.”
He started by organizing a grassroots fundraiser for EMERGENCY in New York City. Across the country, other folks were doing the same thing — in Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, DC and Denver.
By 2008, EMERGENCY USA was formed as a separate 501(c)(3). Talbert had continued to volunteer, helping to organize fundraisers and build a volunteer base of medical workers who could travel to war-torn countries and help educate locals and create permanent health care facilities and workforce.
In 2011, when the organization had enough money to hire someone full time as an executive director, Talbert applied for the job and got it.
“On a very pragmatic level he had demonstrated, for years, full commitment,” says Anna Gilmore, former board president of EMERGENCY USA. “He has a fantastic heart, but he’s also very sound in his judgment and in his choices. In looking back, after the years of working with the organization to build it, it was so solid and that was tied to his technique. He knew really well the timing for when we would have the capacity to approach an opportunity.”
While EMERGENCY’s focus in Sierra Leone had been on providing trauma surgery and orthopedic care at their surgical facility in Goderich, the outbreak of Ebola virus in 2014 created a clear and immediate need.
“We saw it coming from out east,” Talbert says of the spread of the virus from Kenama to Goderich. “We saw it slowly coming.”
Luckily, Talbert says, the facility and the staff were prepared — they quickly set up isolation tents for patients and began screening and treating. But the worst was yet to come.
“By August there was a huge influx [of Ebola patients] near Freetown and that was kind of a tipping point,” Talbert says. “We started thinking about needing to build a treatment center near Freetown because everyone knew the centers out east were going to become full.”
On September 18, EMERGENCY opened a 22-bed Ebola Treatment Center in Lakka, about 10 miles west of Freetown. Then in December the organization opened a first aid post in Waterloo to screen for Ebola, then a 100-bed Ebola treatment center in Goderich.
As of February 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report 8,212 confirmed cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone. 3,408 of these cases have resulted in death.
While Talbert says the overall number of new Ebola cases in Sierra Leone is slowing down, it’s important for everyone involved to stay vigilant.
“It’s a virus that any blood cell, any ember that’s left, can spark and it will spark again because the reasons it spread so quickly the first time are still there, which is the lack of permanent health care structures,” he says.
“I hope we’ve learned a lesson after the civil war in Sierra Leone — there was a lot of talk about coming and helping Sierra Leone after the civil war, but not a lot of action and this is part of what led to the neglect from the international community for the past 13 years that’s led to this crisis,” Talbert says. “As now people have been infected [with Ebola] in the U.K. and the U.S, this illusion of a separation, of a barrier that divides us, just never was true. Now it’s more relevant and obvious to people that to help lift up the health standards of these regions that have been neglected for so long will benefit everybody.”
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