‘Do something useful with life’: St. Paul native helped found organization in Africa during Ebola – Twin Cities
When Colin Dunn and Virginia Price heard about the West Africa Ebola epidemic in 2014, they were in Price’s home state of Maine, working on a sailboat.
Dunn, a St. Paul native, remembers the two, both trained paramedics, questioning why they were there and not abroad helping with the outbreak.
“‘What are we doing sitting on our butts?’” Dunn recalled thinking. “And we poked around a little bit and realized that there was a lack of – need for paramedics, which didn’t jibe with my experience and it didn’t make sense to Virginia who’d worked in the South Pacific a bunch, Antarctica – oh God, she’d covered every continent I hadn’t been on.”
Dunn, 42, had served in the U.S. Air Force and Army for nearly 13 years with deployments to Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and parts of East Africa. In that time abroad, he had done medical work during a cholera outbreak and seen suspected Marburg virus cases in a refugee camp. He’s also worked as a firefighter and paramedic.
He and Price soon saw a role for themselves in the response to Ebola.
“Ebola was in the news a lot and there was funding available and a lot of people willing to donate equipment, but kind of a limited number of people willing to go over there and actually provide treatment and do it safely and correctly to where they weren’t having their folks infected,” Price said. “So, we were really designed to fill that gap of being there.”
Organizing an NGO
The two also knew of other medical providers who were interested in getting involved. It made sense to start an organization of EMS personnel to see how they could help, Dunn said. So the two started International Mutual Aid, a non-governmental organization focused on disaster response.
“(For) some of that formational period, I was so buried in paperwork, all I remember is looking at a computer screen for like two weeks straight,” Dunn said.
While attending a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention course for Ebola responders, the two met a doctor with a friend in Sierra Leone. Though the two had planned to go to Liberia, they realized there may have been more need in rural Sierra Leone.
The paperwork to get IMA registered as a nonprofit was finished in November 2014 and Dunn and Price flew to Sierra Leone in January 2015.
“First arrival in Sierra Leone was weird because that was literally the first time that I remember ever flying into a country that was in a crisis situation without being able to go, ‘OK, if there’s a problem, I can just call back to headquarters and say, hey, we screwed up, we need this,’ which was an interesting feeling,” Dunn said.
A shuttered clinic in a village
Dunn and Price started in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, before going to the village of Gbamandu on the direction of Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health and Sanitation.
The clinic in the village was shuttered at the time of their arrival. The clinic struggled to keep staff during the epidemic and the nurse was too scared to run it by herself, Dunn said. The next village over was under quarantine and patients with Ebola had come through the clinic.
“People just didn’t want to come out of their homes, they didn’t want to see anybody they didn’t know personally,” Dunn said. “It was a very fearful environment, so people were not great at warming up to us initially. It probably took four or five days. And then it flipped and it became an issue of like, ‘Alright, everybody has to get off our veranda, there are 400 of you here and if one of you is sick, we’re all going to get sick.’”
While Gbamandu is a village of about 500 people, their Ebola response effort ended up covering all of Mofinko, the section the village belongs to, which Dunn compares to a county. Mofinko has around 100,000 people. The response effort was being led by British officials. Dunn and Price were doing contact tracing and quarantine checks, in addition to keeping the clinic open.
Most of the first several months were a blur, Dunn said.
“I’ve got one patient that sticks out to me,” he said. “Our first Ebola patient and our first Ebola death, who was a local healer which, that caused a huge problem. I remember her and I remember trying to stay awake for 20 hours a day.”
Ebola response
At the time, the clinic had two rooms, with one of them dedicated to childbirth and one to treating patients. The clinic included one nurse, a vaccinator and two volunteer birthing assistants, along with a few other volunteers.
While Dunn estimates around 30% of their work focused on the Ebola response, the rest was basic healthcare and health education with clinic staff. In Sierra Leone, the leading cause of death across all age groups is malaria. With IMA, Dunn and Price often see diseases not prevalent in the rest of the world, Price said, such as typhoid, river blindness, elephantiasis and leprosy.
As part of the Ebola response, they were running three quarantines in three different villages. Approximately 290 people were under quarantine and there was a large number of Ebola patients in the area’s district, Dunn said.
Eventually, they reached the point when there was no continuing transmission in the area. A hospital around 30 miles from Gbamandu also reopened with the support of the nonprofit Partners in Health, lessening the patient load in rural areas.
“And then the chain of transmission in Kono District stopped and we went home and never thought we’d go back to Sierra Leone again,” Dunn said. “We were wrong.”
While currently Congo and Uganda in central Africa are experiencing an Ebola outbreak, Sierra Leone has not had reported outbreaks. The earlier epidemic in Sierra Leone began in December 2013 and officially ended in June 2016, according to the World Health Organization.
Back to the U.S.
After a number of months, Dunn returned to St. Paul’s Highland Park, where he grew up, to quarantine for 21 days. By the next summer, he was working for the Forest Service in Michigan as a firefighter and EMT before being stationed in Utah.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, IMA was recruited to help Salt Lake County’s health department engineer its quarantine and isolation facilities, Dunn said.
“And this was before we knew what COVID was, so we took some extreme precautions that turned out we didn’t necessarily need,” Dunn said. “But we ran into a problem very quickly in Salt Lake — I think every city did, I know every city did — of what to do about the unhoused population and getting people into places where we could treat them or at least quarantine them or isolate them.”
They used recreation centers in the county to organize patient flow, he said. Most of the people assisting with quarantine isolation facilities were volunteers.
“But it’s exactly the kind of people that then jumped on, ‘Oh, you mean we can keep doing this kind of work somewhere else? Let’s do that,’” Dunn said.
‘Do something useful with life’
As soon as travel restrictions were lifted, IMA sent a team to Sierra Leone in early 2021.
“Our first patient out the door when we got to the village was an infant with an umbilical cord infection. She was two days old or a day and a half old,” Dunn said. “And we realized that part of the problem was the size of the clinic and that we didn’t have anywhere for mothers to stay for a few days like we do in the U.S. after birth.”
Dunn and the clinic’s vaccinator, Moses Yambie, then took a motorbike 30 miles across a treacherous route at night to transport the infant to the nearby hospital. After this, the team came to the conclusion that the village needed a women’s health center where mothers and newborns could stay for up to 72 hours.
Through a connection with one of IMA’s board members, they were able to find a donor for the center. After pitching the idea to the area chiefs, they were able to gather enough community members to build the center.
“And I think we were up and operational within like a month with the – it’s the Sally and Raymond Haik Women’s Health Center,” Dunn said. “It’s actually named after two people from Minneapolis.”
Sally and Raymond Haik were Dunn’s great-aunt and great-uncle.
“My great-uncle, who was a lawyer, Raymond Haik, who is part of the reason I ended up going to Africa, because I asked him if we should go and he was like, ‘What are you doing not going, like, why are you sitting here? Go, go, go, do something useful with life.’ … We delivered our first newborn there three months after it opened, and that was just because we didn’t have anybody to deliver for three months,” Dunn said.
Since opening in March 2021, the women’s health center has had zero maternal deaths and zero birth-related deaths, Dunn said. Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal mortality ratios in the world.
Another non-governmental organization came in and installed solar panels on the center so it has power, Dunn said.
Other improvements
In the nearly 12 years since IMA began, they have seen other improvements. The clinic has expanded to include three exam rooms, a parlor, exterior waiting room, office and pharmacy for IMA’s medications. Yambie now oversees 11 local paid staff as IMA’s country lead. A few people are paid to help at the clinic and transport patients to the hospital, which requires traveling 30 miles on a motorbike because the land is too difficult to traverse in a car. They also do outreach to three other clinics.
A scholarship fund started by IMA in 2025 brings 10 Sierra Leonean medical students to the village for two to four weeks for hands-on training.
“We’ve brought on more local providers and we’ve seen them grow a lot as providers. We’ve had a lot of younger nurses kind of rotate through and a lot of medical students rotate through and learn with us,” Price said. “Our patient population has really gotten notably healthier. We’re seeing less stunting and less maternal and infant mortality. And we’re doing some surveys of typhoid rates and schistosomiasis rates and those are going down, I think largely due to identifying and treating cases and public education.”
And, IMA’s work has expanded into education. Both Dunn and Price have spent time working in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. There, they met Madeleine Kelly, a photojournalist they recruited to help with photography and running IMA’s education program.
With the program, Kelly works with the six grades of children at the village’s school, which is about 10 minutes from the clinic. The school has four teachers and Kelly helps with literacy education, both with children and adults.
At times, more serious cases require telehealth video conferencing with providers abroad, mainly in the U.S. or Europe.
IMA sticks with providers who have worked with them before, who would be familiar with the medical circumstances in Sierra Leone, Price said.
“We see a lot of patients. We change a lot of outcomes,” Price said. “We’ve got very, very good, deep relationships with the communities that we work with and a lot of trust-building. And we get to experience the local culture and make deep, local friendships and connections that … you wouldn’t otherwise if we didn’t have that level of trust.”
‘The best outcome’
Currently, Dunn volunteers for IMA full time. He travels between Salt Lake City and Sierra Leone, and he plans to return to Sierra Leone soon with volunteer medical providers to work on education with local staff at the clinic, check on a water filter installed in the village and prepare for the upcoming school year.
The winter season in the U.S. is typically when IMA sees higher patient loads because it’s the dry season in Sierra Leone, making it easier to travel and seek medical care. That’s when the organization tries to bring in foreign providers to assist.
“It would have been hard to find something more worthwhile to do with my time. It’s been just a opportunity to work with a lot of really good, compassionate, dedicated people, African and American and European,” said Price, who works as IMA’s operations manager.
IMA, and specifically Dunn and Price, have not only helped the community, but integrated into it as well and brought people together, Kelly said, like a local nurse hired by IMA who has become a community leader. Through medical, education and community development, they’ve changed people’s lives, she said.
“The community is extremely welcoming; they want help, and not only do they want help, but they want to be able to do it themselves,” Kelly said. “So a lot of what IMA does is not just stepping in and saying here’s a problem, like, ‘Here’s a solution to your problem,’ but here’s how you can solve the problem yourself and we’re going to give you the tools and the capability to not only help us, but … so that way one day you won’t even need us at all. So I’d say that’s, like, the ultimate goal of IMA is to be obsolete. It’d be great to continue to do this forever, but if one day everyone in the community said, ‘Actually, we don’t need you guys anymore, we’ve been able to do it ourselves,’ it would be the best outcome.”
How to help
To donate to International Mutual Aid, go to im-aid.org/support-ima.html.
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