We met him because he had just been released a couple days before and he was reaching over the tarps to throw drinks and food to his mom, still in the Ebola ward.

BCS: We went to Kenema , the city he lived in, which was the heart of the outbreak at the time. The hospital was really under the worst stress for the outbreak. They were just whizzing bodies by in kind of like lackluster body bags. It was really a dangerous place.

Video journalist Ben C. Solomon traveled across West Africa for three months last summer covering the outbreak for The New York Times. He met Erison at a hospital on the day he began filming. Solomon tells the story of their meeting to Only A Game.

Erison Turay of Sierra Leone is one of nearly 16,000 people who survived the virus. He has founded a soccer team made up of Ebola survivors.

In reality these guys have a lot of health problems, and it’s hard for them to play just as is. But just the fact that — I think that a lot of the communities don’t accept the survivors. A lot of the communities really stigmatize them and push them away. It’s hard, Ebola as an outbreak, because there’s no real person or face to put the blame on or to put the worry on. And for the survivors, I think they take a lot of the brunt of that anger and that frustration towards the outbreak. So this team kind of became a reasoning to kind of show that they can be real people too.

Solomon attended the team’s first game, a match against the Ebola aid workers.

BCS: It was scaldingly hot, but it was packed. There were hundreds and hundreds of people. I think the people when they walked in were very nervous and very curious to see what it was. I mean, I think people had heard bad things about survivors. They had kind of worried about them. But as soon as the game was over, they were just as accepted in the community as they ever were. It was really a beautiful moment to see not only Erison but the whole team kind of embraced and welcomed back into this community and without the stigmas and the fears of this virus.

Erison (far right) and his teammates lost to a team of Ebola aid workers, but all were smiling after the game. ("Erison And The Ebola Soccer Survivors")

Ben C. Solomon and his colleagues at the New York Times won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their coverage of the Ebola outbreak. Solomon has since written that catching up with Erison was “one of the most important stories of our Ebola coverage.”