Liberia: Living with Ebola

Although the rate of infections in the West African nation of Liberia seems now to be in decline, for months the country has been on the frontline of the fight against the deadly virus.
Since the start of the outbreak last year, around 14,000 people in eight nations have contracted Ebola, killing 5,000. Most of the deaths have been in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Working alongside Liberian investigative reporter Mae Azango and producer Clive Patterson, Sorious films with a Red Cross body collection team who travel around Monrovia, Liberia's capital, picking up the dangerously contagious corpses of the deceased. Several of the workers have already paid with their lives for doing this job, but the work is vital to keep the spread of infection under control.
Some of them are unpaid volunteers. Robert is one such young man. Fully aware of the risks, he nevertheless believes it is worth the sacrifice: "I'm doing this to have this particular sickness alleviated from my country. I love my people," he said.
But the work was taking its toll. "I eat alone," he explained. "My girlfriends do not want to visit me; my friends do not want to visit me…."
Sorious also spent time in an Ebola treatment unit run by Medicin Sans Frontieres - and met Salome, a young woman who had lost many of her family to the virus but had somehow survived its ravages herself.
"It feels like it's a sickness from another planet," she said. "Because it has 100 percent severe pain from head to toes. You can even feel the pain in the marrow of your bones."
But Sorious also encountered deep anger among Liberian health workers. Infuriated by their pay and conditions they were suspicious that the government corruption was preventing the distribution of money donated by the international community.
That distrust of the authorities was also evident in the wider population. One of the emergency response teams had been called to a slum called Red Light, one of Monrovia's poorest and most densely populated districts and exactly the kind of place where Ebola thrives. A young man, evidently with Ebola symptoms, had taken refuge on a roof. If the paramedics had not arrived in time to talk him down, one of them doctors explained, the gathering crowd below might have taken matters into their own hands and killed the sick man.
"One of the major things that is affecting the country is fear," an onlooker explained as the patient is loaded into an ambulance. "The health facilities in the country, in the various communities, all is shut down, because of the same fear."
This remarkable film gives a deeply disturbing insight into what it is like to live in a society gripped by dread of contagion and mistrust of the authorities, a place where no one shakes hands any more, where a mother will think twice before picking up a sick child to give it comfort. But it is also a world in which ordinary people are making the most extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of their community - and indeed the rest of us.