Letters to CDC Ebola Workers

Ohio high-school students write to CDC Ebola workers – and the workers write back.

English teacher Courtney White at Cleveland Heights High School came up with a creative exercise while her students were learning about Ebola: write thank-you notes to medical workers. She never imagined that the students' letters would have far-reaching implications, and that her students would get so many replies in return.

The project began last fall, when Ebola virus was headlining the news. Students read articles about the disease and discussed the medical response in Africa and the U.S. "I wanted to do a service learning project on something they had learned about in class," said White. "I was really moved by the CDC Director's comments in TIME magazine on who he was thankful for around Thanksgiving." She sent the letters to CDC, and she and her students were surprised and pleased to get replies from the CDC Ebola Response Team in Sierra Leone and other CDC responders deployed to West Africa.

Ms. White's class with incident map from CDC with notes from CDC Sierra Leone Response Team on the back.*

Student Letters
View a flipbook of letters and responses here [7.3 MB].

"You never know what will happen when you send a thank-you note," said White. Her students wrote in December, thanking the response workers for their service and asking what motivates them to do the work. "The students wrote wonderful, in-depth letters, both encouraging the workers and asking questions about their lives and motivation to do this work."

Ms. White sent the letters to CDC, and then they went viral. Throughout the agency and abroad the letters circulated among CDC staffers involved in the Ebola response. So many CDC staff were touched by the students' support and encouragement that they offered to write back to the students.

In February Ms. White and her students received their first reply from CDC: "We received heartfelt notes from the CDC Ebola Response Team in Sierra Leone, written on the back of a big Ebola incidence map." Thirty members of the response team wrote brief notes to the students to thank them for their support.

The students were impressed by the responses, which included specific answers to questions they asked in their letters. Nataysha Brown was thrilled that one of the notes included an answer to her question, "What gave you this indomitable spirit?" Barb G. replied: "How do we have the indomitable spirit to do this? It is really the people of Africa who should win an award for that! The people who live here are poor financially, but very rich in indomitable spirit!"

Deonte Martin enjoyed learning more about what response workers do everyday. "Just learning more about their day-to-day life is interesting," he said. "And it made the lives of people so far away seem more real."

Ta'Ron Wright appreciated the response workers' dedication to service. He is in the Criminal Justice program at Cleveland Heights High and said, "It's important to show our gratitude to people who are serving others."

CDC recently sent another set of in-depth letters with answers to student questions and photos included. Below are the students' thank-you letters and the replies from CDC staff deployed to West Africa.

*Photo Credit: Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District