FIVE DAYS OF FRENZY

So when “Ebola happened,” as Shay puts it, he was thrust into the middle of the frantic effort to relay information to those surrounding the affected apartment.

As representatives from Dallas County, the City of Dallas, Dallas Police, the Center for Disease Control and Hazardous Materials steadily joined the effort, there were two major goals: stop potential spread of the Ebola virus and prevent panic. Explains Stacey Roth, the public safety coordinator for Vickery Meadow Improvement District, both relied heavily on good communication.

At The Ivy, where so many languages are spoken, communication was problematic.

That’s where Shay would prove invaluable. “We thought he worked for The Ivy at first,” Roth says. “This kid. He was talking to everyone. Answering their questions. Handing out literature about Ebola. Speaking calmly to people who were upset.”

Like Shay, most of The Ivy residents — especially those from Asia, where Ebola is not a problem — did not know what Ebola meant.

They didn’t even fully understand the concept of a virus, Roth notes.

That first afternoon, after repeating the same information so many times, Shay sat down for about an hour with pen and paper and translated vital information about Ebola into Burmese.

He took the translation to The Ivy office and made 100 copies, which he distributed to the Burmese residents.

This was before the CDC delivered the same information in Spanish and English, and 14 days before other agencies offered to help translate important information, Range notes.

Later, a Dallas ISD translator helped interpret incoming information, but the initial, urgent translation came from Shay.

Shay says his school allowed him a day off to help with communication at The Ivy.

He walked door-to-door with police, city and county officials, and VMID and CDC representatives, translating.

Shay interpreted for a British reporter early on, he says, but the lady they were trying to interview, 614’s next-door neighbor, reacted angrily. “She yelled, ‘Get out of my house!’ ” Shay says. Another woman threw rice at a reporter, Shay says. Shay, too, grew agitated with the media.

“They were stopping us on the way to school, making us late, trying to talk to little kids. The kids got smart and just responded in their own language, even if they knew English,” he says.

Range says reporters were increasingly aggressive. She describes some walking into homes without knocking or barely knocking. Many of the residents do not lock their doors so family and friends can come and go, she explains.

One national news reporter barricaded herself in an elderly man’s apartment, Range says. The man was distraught when he reported the situation to the apartment manager, using Shay to translate. The reporter refused to open the door for the manager or

“Well, the residents at that point were not worried about Ebola,” she says. “They were worried about the media.”

And the fallout continued.

Several children who reportedly had been in contact with Duncan were pulled from school for observation. Some students from Vickery Meadow reported classmates picking on them.

Residents of The Ivy were told to stay home from work in some cases.

The VMID brought in an attorney to meet with residents who had been denied a right to work because of the Ebola scare.

Some of the hundreds of volunteers who work in Vickery Meadow stopped coming in, and the National Night Out block party and parade was canceled.

The United States Postal Service halted mail delivery.

“This really upset the residents,” Range says. “They were probably as upset about not getting their mail as anything.”

When the mail carrier eventually returned to The Ivy, he was wearing a mask and blocked off his vehicle with cones.

Finally, health officials announced that Troh and the other quarantined residents would be moved, and they sent in the Hazmat team to clean the apartment.

“It is not so much a concern that we need to get her out of here because it’s dangerous or anything like that,” City of Dallas public information officer Sana Syed told reporters at the time. They were moved, she said, because they and the rest of The Ivy’s residents were scared.

A decontamination crew filled and removed about 140 barrels of material from apartment 614, and officials escorted the family to a secret address.

The media’s departure, for the most part, coincided with Troh’s.

Vickery Meadow is a 2.68-square-mile neighborhood bordered by Central, Royal,

Abrams and Northwest Highway. It is home to 25,329 people — almost 100 for-rent complexes and 15 single-family homes. It is ethnically diverse. More than 4,351 school-age children live there. In the ’70s and ’80s it was a booming singles community, but by the ’90s the area was so downtrodden that a neighborhood improvement district, which garners municipal funds to help struggling areas, was approved.

Today the area — Lake Highlands’ nextdoor neighbor — is an example of what a good improvement district can do. Since the Vickery Meadow Improvement District formed, crime has dropped 60 percent — from 4,262 violent crimes in 1990 to 1,336 in 2013, according to police department statistics.

Before moving to Dallas, Stacey Roth was a beat cop in New Orleans’ French Quarter. She is a tough lady (she was in three physical fights during the last Mardi Gras season she worked, she says). Yet her family voiced concern two years ago when she accepted a job as public safety coordinator for the