Liberia after Ebola: ‘The human suffering changed me’ – Al Jazeera Feature Article

By Ashoka Mukpo

The storm in Liberia began three years ago this summer. The word Ebola had first passed from radio to ear across the country in spring. In June, the disease was no more than an ethereal curiosity, vaguely menacing but thankfully confined to the faraway Guinean jungles and more likely to be the butt of a joke or conspiracy theory in Monrovia than cause for real concern.

But by the same month one devastating year later, nearly 5,000 Liberians had been killed by the disease. Many of them had been unceremoniously cremated at a remote site near a beach, the fragments of their bones dumped into oil drums or buried near pyres hastily set up by the government as part of a euphemistically dubbed “safe burial” programme.

Thousands more survived the disease, leaving foreboding treatment units for empty homes, their lives turned upside down by the loss of loved ones, with aching joints and heartache as the daily price on the ledger of their victory.

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Source: Al Jazeera News Online