MONROVIA,
Liberia — A couple of dozen students sat quietly inside the C.D.B.
King Elementary School’s dim and dusty auditorium on their first morning
back. Despite the stuffy heat, many of the children wore long sleeves
and trousers that covered as much skin as possible.
A
second grader wore pink knit mittens that muffled the sound of his
clapping when the teachers introduced themselves. As everyone rose to
sing Liberia’s national anthem, he saluted with his left hand, still
sheathed in the mitten.
“Ebola
destroyed and devastated our land,” Venoria Crayton, the vice
principal, told her pupils. “It brought us sadness, it brought us pain.
Some of your neighbors died, right? Some of your neighbors’ children
died, right? But you are here.”
About eight months after governments in the region closed schools to stop the spread of Ebola, uniformed and backpack-carrying schoolchildren have returned to the streets of Monrovia, the capital, perhaps the most visible sign of the epidemic’s ebb.
But
Liberia’s on-again, off-again back-to-school campaign is also a measure
of the long shadow cast by Ebola, a disease that affected almost every
facet of society in the hardest-hit countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone and
Guinea.
Though
Ebola cases have all but disappeared in Liberia, with the Health
Ministry saying Wednesday that the last patient in treatment had tested
negative for the virus, lingering fear and a depressed economy have
dampened the turnout at schools. Many have yet to reopen, having failed
to meet the minimum requirements put in place to prevent transmission of
the virus.
Many
of those that have reopened are struggling. Just as Liberia’s weak
health care system collapsed as Ebola began raging across the country,
many people here worry that the nation’s schools may be ill equipped to
handle even the tail end of the epidemic.
C.D.B.
King, despite being in the center of the capital, lacks electricity and
running water, and has only a few toilet stalls for a student
population that numbered 1,000 before the outbreak.
Now,
the school is trying to overcome those longstanding problems — and the
ravages of a disease that has killed more than 9,600 people in the
region.
Fanning
herself with a sheet of paper, Ms. Crayton, the vice principal, rattled
off a list of don’ts: Don’t play rough. Don’t exchange pencils. Don’t
share food. Don’t spit. Don’t urinate in the courtyard. Don’t hide
illness in the family.
“If you want to live,” she told the students, “don’t lie about Ebola.”
By the end of the first day of class, only about 30 students had showed up.
“People
are still afraid, so they are careful with their kids,” said Augustus
Seongbae, the principal. “Many of them are watching what happens to the
kids who come first.”
Fierce
disagreement over whether to resume classes forced the government to
change the original start date of Feb. 2 several times before finally
deciding to reopen schools on a rolling basis starting on Feb. 16. The
government said that with Ebola waning, many children were already
playing in their communities, and that potential teaching time in the
classroom was being frittered away.
But
some lawmakers, education officials and parents argued that children
should not go back to school until Liberia is declared free of Ebola, or
42 days after the last case of the disease — which experts say could be months away.
Tolbert
Nyenswah, the Liberian deputy health minister in charge of the Ebola
response, said Wednesday that there had been no new confirmed cases of
the disease in the country for 12 days, but that officials were still
tracking 102 people for possible exposure to the virus.
“We are not out of the woods yet,” he said.
Even
as Ebola wanes, the country and its schools are facing countless other
challenges. Maryland County, in eastern Liberia, is suffering from an
outbreak of whooping cough,
affecting about 200 children, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, just as schools are set to reopen there.
Many
parents have complained that because of Ebola’s chilling effect on the
economy, they needed more time to gather the resources to send their
children to school.
Miatta
Fahnbulleh, the mother of the boy with the pink mittens, James Nyema,
9, used to send him to a private school. But because she had been
unemployed for months from her job as a kindergarten teacher, she had
chosen to send him to C.D.B. King, a public school. Public schools are
free, though parents must pay for uniforms and other supplies.
She
walked her son, known as J.C. because his middle name is Christian, to
school in the morning with a blue plastic bag containing his lunch and a
water bottle.
“I
told him when he was going, ‘Don’t deal with anybody, don’t drink
anybody’s water, don’t touch anybody,’ ” she said, laughing, as she came
to pick up her son after lunch.
Graphic
Ending the Ebola Outbreak
Months of declining cases have fed hopes that the Ebola outbreak might finally be ending.
She
had dressed him in trousers and long sleeves, which he usually wore
only during the rainy season — not now, the driest and hottest time of
the year. She had bought the mittens at a nearby market, where they had
become available during the height of the epidemic last year.
“What can I do?” she said, laughing again.
Liberia’s 14-year civil war, which ended in 2003, destroyed schools and left a generation that is less educated than older ones.
“Prominent
people came from our school, ministers and government officials,” said
Thomas Deshield, a teacher at C.D.B. King, which is named after a former
president and is one of the oldest public schools in the capital.
Since
the end of the war, Liberia has focused on expanding access to
education; 1.2 million Liberians were in school before Ebola, out of a
population of 4.3 million. But C.D.B. King and many other public schools
suffer from a scarcity of resources and crumbling infrastructure.
Public schoolteachers are often poorly trained and unmotivated.
“We
realize that it’s been good to get a lot of people in,” said Albert
Coleman, the Ministry of Education official overseeing the reopening of
schools. “But if we must develop and move forward as a country, our
emphasis should be more on quality and a little bit less on access.”
Most
Liberians prefer enrolling their children in private schools, which
account for more than a third of the nation’s 4,460 educational
facilities. But with many private schools now reporting a drop in
enrollment because parents are unable to afford them, many parents are
expected to register their children at already strained public schools
in the weeks and months ahead.
At
C.D.B. King, Ms. Crayton arrived at 6:30 a.m. on the second day of
class to try to make the school safe against Ebola. No one at the school
had received any direct training, so she consulted an instruction
pamphlet she had received along with materials from international donors
— infrared thermometers, buckets, chlorine, rubber boots and gloves,
brushes and soap.
She
chased away local petty traders who had stored their goods overnight in
the schoolyard. “This is a government school,” she told one woman, who
scampered away with her wares on her head.
