Ebola work left mark on Army veteran Jordan
DOMINIC MOFFITT
AN ex-soldier has talked about his experiences working in Africa during the Ebola epidemic.
Jordan Wilson, from Accrington, first joined the Army at 16 before spending three months in Sierra Leone supporting the humanitarian relief effort there.
The 26-year-old says he experienced death on an almost daily basis, something he didn’t really come to terms with until he left the Army in 2018.
Jordan began experiencing mental health issues when he started to fully understand what he had experienced while in Africa.
“When you’re with family and friends, in the confines of your own home, you don’t realise how safe you actually are,” Jordan said.
“You take it for granted until you go to a place like Sierra Leone, where we went was pretty remote and rural, these people were pretty much wiped out by the epidemic.
“It was just so surreal to see how they lived. I would drive to work and you would see babies and bodies wrapped up on the side of the road ready to be taken away by the Ebola team. Death was just normalised.”
Jordan first joined the army at 16, working out of the Royal Engineers back in 2010.
In 2015 he was given the opportunity to travel to West Africa where an Ebola epidemic had arisen in several countries, including Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The disease would tear through much of West Africa for the best part of two years, killing around 4,000 people.
Jordan said: “Initially we only went out there for a week.
“And then I ended up staying for three months, we did a lot of ground investigation then I designed and ran some projects until completion.
“The team I was in at the time were relatively busy with active roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, to have the chance to go out on an active role in somewhere like Sierra Leone, it was a great oppertunity.
“But it was quite daunting once you saw the reality of it.”
Jordan may have only stayed in West Africa for three months but his time there would stick with him.
Even though he spent a full eight years in the Army, it is his time helping out the epidemic that resonates with him most.
He said: “You can’t really process it until you get out. Seeing what I saw; it affects you but you lock it away and put off looking at it.”
In January 2018 Jordan decided to leave the British Army for good.
He had just become engaged and was keen to pursue a career away from the armed forces.
“To be honest I didn’t want to spend 24 years in the Army,” said Jordan.
“I was young enough to start a new career and had found a new opportunity.”
But Jordan was barely out of the Army when he was bowled over by a harrowing occurrence in his life.
While working for his family construction business he found one of his close relatives dead.
“I went to go and pick up one of my family members and found them deceased in the bath,” said Jordan.
“I had seen death before in Sierra Leone but this brought it all back to me, I was much closer to it this time and I had a bit of a meltdown for six to 12 months.”
Thankfully Jordan would recover from his mental health episode through the use of counselling and medication but he never forgot the people that helped him along the way.
Last May he raised more than £1,700 for the mental health charity StrongMen, climbing the height of Mount Everest on a stair master while wearing a 15 kilo bulletproof vest.
The veteran said: “The charity just resonated with me, it was started by the dad of a soldier who was killed on active duty.
“It’s all about supporting men on speaking out about their mental health, about saying its healthy to speak out when you’re having a bit of a rubbish time of it.”