Ebola Orphans, Caretakers & Survivors

Ebola Orphans & Caretakers

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Aaron and Alex Flomo

Brothers Aaron and Alex Flomo were orphaned by the death of their parents from Ebola in the summer of 2014. None of their relatives in the low-income community of West Point had the resources to assume custody of them. Instead, they have lived with a series of different West Point neighbors. But they have behavioral issues—understandable given the trauma they endured—and so they usually only last a couple months with each host family before being passed onto the next. Aaron is lately doing better, attending school and a counseling program, but Alex refuses to go to school.

Favor Dean

Favor Dean, 10, enjoys acting. She recently appeared in a play at Monrovia City Hall about the Ebola epidemic. During the epidemic, she lost her parents and now lives with her grandmother in the house in the background. All 11 people who lived in her previous residence died, except Favor.

Miatta, Morris, Ahmed, and Jartu Kanneh

Twins Miatta and Jartu (far left and far right) stand with their older brother Ahmed and younger brother Morris. The children were orphaned by Ebola and now live with their grandmother, Annie Massaquoi, pictured in the next image to the right.

Annie Massaquoi

Annie Massaquoi is the grandmother and now primary caregiver to twins Miatta and Jartu, their older brother Ahmed and younger brother Morris, who were orphaned by Ebola. They live in Low Cost Village, which was especially hard hit by the epidemic: Eighteen people died, the village was quarantined several times—which meant it was cut off from food supplies—and residents were ostracized by surrounding towns. Low Cost Village was originally built by the Liberian government as a settlement for refugees from Sierra Leone’s civil war in the early 1990s.

Ma Rosie's Grand Daughter

Ma Rosie’s youngest granddaughter holds a basket with cola nuts. She is presenting them to a visitor, along with the other traditional item of welcome, palm wine. She is one of fourteen Ebola orphans Ma Rosie takes care of.

Abraham Kpoto

Abraham Kpoto, 18, survived Ebola but lost both his parents to the disease. He now lives with neighbors in a small room and his younger sister lives in an orphanage.

Hawa Miller, Hannah and Harriet

After Hawa Miller (center) lost her father to Ebola, her mother attended the memorial, but then, according to a family member, “freaked out and disappeared.” Hawa and her four siblings were forced to move in with her Aunt Patience and six cousins, two of whom are pictured here (Hannah and Harriet). In spite of the large combined family, her aunt somehow manages to pay Hawa’s school fees. In this photo, Hawa is 15 and has just graduated from eighth grade. Her favorite subject is history.

Patience Miller

Patience Miller (Hawa Miller’s aunt) already had six children when her brother died of Ebola, and she took in his five children. But she is a fierce and determined woman. After her brother’s children moved in with her, neighbors shunned the family because of the Ebola stigma, sometimes passing and staring but refusing to converse. Patience said she became “enraged” with them and “shouted them down.”

Rita, Princess, and Quita

Rita, Princess, and Quita (from left to right) lost both parents to Ebola and are now looked after by their 23-year-old sister, Facia. Facia supports the family by smashing rocks into smaller pieces that can be sold for use by people building houses, who include a layer of crushed rock as part of the foundation.

Wokie Torbor and Aunt Gwendolyn

After Wokie Torbor (left) and her three older siblings lost their parents to Ebola, they movied in with their Aunt Gwendolyn (right), who already had three children of her own. Gwendolyn lives in West Point, the most deprived community in the Liberian capital. She makes her living by selling bags of cold water, which she chills in the refrigerator at left in the photo. When this photo was taken, the refrigerator was broken.

Kulah Borbor

Since 2010, Kulah Borbor has run a safe house in her home in West Point, the poorest slum in Monrovia, Liberia, taking care of abandoned and abused children. Two of the children Kulah has tended are orphans from the Ebola epidemic.

Kulah and Girls

Among the children the Kulah Borbor takes care of in her West Point safe house for children are these two orphans from the Ebola epidemic: Musu Sheriff (left) and Beatrice Magioga (right). Beatrice was put in her care by Beatrice’s father as he headed in an ambulance to a hospital, where he died. Musu was living with an elderly woman who died during the crisis, after which people in her community handed her over to Kulah because they could not locate any members of Musu’s family.

Nancy Tamba and Auntie Moses

Nancy Tamba, seventeen in this photo (at right), was thirteen when was taken to the ETU in an ambulance with seven other people: her mother, father, two brothers, her aunt and uncle, and a friend. Of the eight, she was the only one to survive Ebola. At the time, she lived in the far north of Liberia, in Lofa County, but she has since moved to the capital region, to be cared for by her Auntie Moses (left). She attends eighth grade, but is hampered periodically by blurred vision and what she calls a “loose stomach.”

Alison Natee

In August 2014, as one by one the members of Alison Natee’s family in Barclay Farm, Liberia, became infected with Ebola, he provided food and care to each sick person. When one by one by one all six people died, he moved their bodies to an empty room in the house because no burial teams were available. Miraculously, he himself never caught the disease. Left alone, he moved to Firestone company land for a temporary job, and in his absence, health authorities razed the house, leaving the crater behind him in this photo. He now works as a pen-pen driver (motorcycle taxi).

Tata Menefe

Fourteen-year-old Tata Manefe holds a recently harvested cassava. Tata and her three older siblings—two sisters and a brother—were orphaned by Ebola in the fall of 2014. Afterward, to support themselves, they decided to establish a farm on family land in rural Montserrado County. Currently, the farm is thriving: it produces not only cassava but peanuts, corn, and bananas, which they sell for profit at a local market. It is not easy work: the walk from their home to the farm takes 45 minutes. But their story is typical of the incredible resilience and initiative shown by so many orphans and survivors in spite of horrible tragedy.

Ebola Survivors

Sampson Karouway

Sampson Karyouway stands on his stoop in Monrovia, Liberia. In the fall of 2014, Sampson came down with Ebola and spent several weeks in an ETU after his mother, father, and one of his sisters died of the disease. After experiencing the trauma, he came home to find that his neighbors were afraid of him, incorrectly believing he could transmit Ebola. Many would not talk to him, some would speak to him but only from a distance, and some packed up and moved away. He had earned money as a carpenter before the epidemic, making furniture, but afterwards it took months before anyone would buy his beds, tables, and dressers.

Louise Peters

Louise Peters was one of four Ebola survivors in Low Cost Village. Eighteen residents of the village died of the disease. Louise makes her living farming cassava, but in doing so, contends with medical after-effects of Ebola. She has lost the ability to “see for distance” and experiences memory lapses. Sometimes, she says, she puts something down and it takes her three days to find it.

Aminata Kamara

Aminata Kamara contracted Ebola when it swept through the clinic where her husband was a doctor and where she and her family lived in an upstairs apartment. In all, 13 people who lived or worked at the clinic died, including Aminata’s husband. She is now training to be a nurse and helping run the clinic, because, as she says, she doesn’t want her husband’s dream to die.

Ma Justina Nagbe

Ma Justina Nagbe almost died of Ebola in the ETU. She didn’t eat solid food for the entire three weeks she spent there. Before she left for the hospital, she slept close to her children and they took care of her—but somehow none of them contracted the disease. “God is a miracle man,” she says. When Justina came home to recover, neighbors were unsympathetic to her situation. They refused to let her children use the community water pump because of the stigma associated with survivors. Eventually, her landlord evicted her because he didn’t want a survivor on his property. She was among the 28 percent of survivors who lost their homes because of Ebola stigma.

Finda Fallah

Like many survivors, Finda Falah (center, with baby) suffers from lingering health problems. She experiences severe joint pan periodically, but her biggest problem is difficulty eating. Whenever she eats, she feels nauseated, a problem she refers to as “bitter throat.” Her daughter Fala, also a survivor, complains of ringing in her ears and struggles with anger for which she could use psychological help. But there is a massive shortage of mental health care in Liberia—there are only three psychiatrists in the entire country.

Philip Lorkolon

One day in August 2014, Margibi County resident Philip Lorkolon noticed that his wife’s eyes looked especially red. He advised her to stay home and take it easy while he went off to his job as a mason. Four days later, she died of Ebola, leaving him a widower with three children. He was one of thousands of Liberians rendered a single parent by the epidemic.

Obadiah Sumo

Obadiah Sumo works in the health care field, as a pharmacy (pictured here) owner and clinic administrator. So when he started to experience the symptoms of Ebola, at first he treated himself. Eventually, he needed more serious care and checked himself into an ETU. He managed to survive, but in the months afterward experienced several medical issues. His memory loss became so severe that he could not read for six months, because he could not retain anything. His vision problems reached the point where he almost went blind. These problems have subsided, but Obadiah has suffered an additional setback. Right before contracting Ebola, he won the green card lottery to move to the United States. But now, because of his Ebola survivor status, he has been denied a passport.

Sister Nancy

Nancy Writebol - an American missionary, office administrator, and nurse’s assistant - caught Ebola while working at ELWA Hospital in Monrovia. She was flown back to the United States in a sealed pod and received significant press coverage upon her arrival. After treatment at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, she returned to Liberia, where she conducts trauma healing with groups of survivors, who relate to her because she has been through the same experience. She has also done trauma healing with the “cremation boys,” men hired to cremate bodies during the crisis.

Miatta Varney

Miatta Varney lost her husband and three children to Ebola, and she herself caught the disease and spent almost a month in an ETU. She now supports her five remaining children and seven orphaned grandchildren with the proceeds from her front-porch shop outside Kakata, Liberia. Somehow she manages to pay school fees for all seven grandchildren. On top of it all, she has developed health problems that she didn’t have before Ebola—high blood pressure and diabetes.

Watchen Wilson

Watchen Wilson lost her mother, father, and three siblings to Ebola before contracting the disease herself in November 2014. When taken to the ETU, she left behind a 3-month-old child. After she recovered and returned home, local shopkeepers wouldn’t sell to her, believing her mother was a witch who had put a curse on the family.

Wokie Gray

When Wokie Gray returned to her community after surviving Ebola in the hospital, she encountered much less stigma than most survivors. She was an experienced midwife and the community desperately needed her services because no hospitals were delivering babies. So the usual suspicion dissolved amid practical necessity.

Beatrice Yardol

In March 2015, Beatrice Yardol was the last Ebola patient discharged from a Liberian hospital, an event celebrated in national newspapers and commemorated with a visit by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to Yardol’s home. In this photo, she is standing in the part of her home where she sequestered herself from her family when she started to feel symptoms.