Boston Doctor Is Raising Money to Compensate Unpaid Ebola Workers

When Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease doctor at Boston Medical Center, joined the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone last year, she kept hearing the same thing from local healthcare workers: The pay they had been promised had not come for months—if at all.

“These are folks that really invested so much of their own lives into it and faced stigma in their communities,” Bhadelia says. “They were finding themselves in a situation where they were putting their lives at risk every day, they were seeing their friends pass away, and they weren’t getting paid.”

Now that the healing has begun, Bhadelia wants to set things right. In mid-June, she launched a Go Fund Me page with the goal of raising $50,000, all of which would go toward retroactively paying healthcare workers. At the time this article was written, the project had raised $3,750, enough to compensate five workers and their families.