West Africans living in the U.S. are having difficulties going about their daily routines because of the stigma attached to Ebola and West Africa.
Alphonso Toweh, a writer from Liberia who is visiting Washington, couldn't ride a bus without others assuming he was contaminated with the deadly disease.
Toweh explains to Washington Post he was asked by the man sitting next to him where he was from. After replying with "Liberia" their conversation was over.
"At that point, the man went far from me," Toweh tells WP. "He did not want to come close to me. People, once they know you are Liberian, people assume you have the virus in your body, which is not the case."
Sometimes Toweh is afraid to speak to anyone at all in attempts to hide his Liberian identity.
"If I'm on the Metro, I don't talk," he tells WP. "If I'm on the bus, I don't talk. If people hear the accent, they think you are Liberian, then you have Ebola, which is not the case. Not all Liberians have Ebola."
Similarly, Karen Mygil, a surgeon in Bowie, Maryland, who moved to America almost two-years-ago, had a similar experience when she revealed her background to a patient who was making small talk with her about Ebola.
"The patient gave some feedback about what he had heard about the news, and I said, 'Well, you know, I'm from Liberia,'" Mygil recounts to Huffington Post. "He jerked himself back from my hands, and he said, 'You're from Liberia?'"
Toweh and Mygil are only two of thousands of people who experience this stigma in the U.S. every day. Over 650,000 immigrants in the U.S. are from West Africa (78,000 are from Liberia - the country hit the hardest with Ebola) according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
