An article on the importance of burial rituals following the ebola crisis.
Finda Fallah sat in her tiny one-bedroom apartment, boiling up rice and leftovers with one of the few children in her family still alive.
It was the night before Decoration Day, one of the nation’s most important public holidays, when Liberians clean, paint and decorate the graves of their relatives to honor lost loved ones.
But this year, after the Ebola outbreak decimated her family, there were no plots for Ms. Fallah to tidy. Burials were banned because of the highly contagious nature of corpses. The only grave Ms. Fallah could visit was that of her brother-in-law, whose funeral led to the infections in her family.
The thought of his grave made her angry, especially because her mother, sister, husband, two nephews and her 8-month-old baby, Fayiah, were cremated, leaving painfully little to mark their passing.
“I can’t go outside,” she said the next day, when the holiday came.
Decoration Day is a tradition adopted by freed American slaves who in the early 1800s settled in the area of West Africa that became Liberia. The national public holiday, which had its 99th anniversary on Wednesday, is often as much a celebration of life as a memorial to the dead.
But this year, it was a somber affair in the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic. The outbreak disrupted the intimate funeral practices that sometimes involve the bathing of dead relatives, the braiding of hair and the kissing and touching of bodies at burial services.
“May we pause to remember all of those who lost their lives during this Ebola crisis; I say they were heroes and not victims,” said the Rev. Christopher Toe, at a church service for Decoration Day on Wednesday. “Had they not died, the international community would not have come. Had they not died the U.S. government would not have sent all the U.S. Marines they sent.”
“They did not die in vain,” he added.
A handful of deputy ministers and ministry of health staff members sat in the pews of the half-filled Presbyterian church in the heart of the capital, Monrovia, for the national celebration. Members of the United Nations Ebola mission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined them.
“Today is not an official government of Liberia memorial day ceremony for Ebola victims,” said Tolbert Nyenswah, the head of Liberia’s Ebola response. “Because Ebola is not over.”
The countdown until Liberia is officially declared Ebola-free is on. It began on March 5, when the last known Ebola patient, Beatrice Yardolo, 58, an English teacher, was discharged from a Chinese Ebola treatment unit.
Ms. Fallah, who herself was infected with Ebola, had to care for her children, nieces and nephews in an elementary school that was turned into a makeshift holding center where people suspected of having Ebola were housed, in squalid conditions, before being taken to one of the few treatment centers in the city at the time.
In a damp blue classroom, Ms. Fallah fed and cared for them, trying to separate the sick from the well. She was the only adult caring for seven children. Then the center was ransacked by angry residents in August, and she and her children were left wandering through the vast neighborhood, known as West Point.
Ms. Fallah still dreams about her little nephew, Tamba Nilo, who died in a treatment center, rolling around in a long T-shirt, saying “I’m hungry.”
Ms. Fallah believes her psychological survival now depends on forgetting. She bows her head and passes through special routes in the narrow sandy alleyways to avoid the school and the cramped house where she and her family used to live. She tries not to let her eyes dwell on women who remind her of her mother.
While Ms. Fallah survived, she does not know how much longer she can last, having only limited support from a nongovernmental organization that is paying her rent and sponsoring her niece’s school fees. Ebola survivors are now lobbying for more support.
Friday 13 March 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/world/africa/ebola-thief-of-rituals-leaves-no-graves-to-decorate.html?_r=0
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