Back to School, Though Not Back to Normal, in a Liberia Still Fearful of Ebola

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

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.

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.

The school’s lone security guard — who ran at least two side businesses, including renting out the schoolyard for storage and operating a prepaid cellphone card business just outside the school entrance — was put in charge of taking incoming students’ temperature. Hand-washing stations, filled with chlorine and water drawn from the well in the schoolyard, were set up at the entrances to the school and the toilets.

A teacher rang a cowbell to call the morning assembly. After the Lord’s Prayer, Ms. Crayton warned her students, “Ebola is still in town, so we just want you to be very, very, very careful.”

The first student to show up for school that morning, and most mornings that week, was J.C., with his pink mittens.

Born in a United Nations refugee camp in Ghana, where his mother stayed for several years, J.C. now lived 15 minutes away from the school, sharing a room with his mother and younger sister.

During the epidemic, J.C.’s mother never let him outside the home. A creative boy who often talked to himself, J.C. did pirouettes and seemed to be performing plays in his mind. He had no problem keeping himself occupied, his mother, Ms. Fahnbulleh, said.

But even J.C. was getting restless and was eager to be back in school, though perhaps not on the third morning of the first week when he and two classmates were called into the vice principal’s office. The three boys had drunk from J.C.’s water bottle, and a girl in the classroom had immediately told on them.

“I threatened to send them home,” the vice principal said. “But they begged. They got on the floor. ‘You can beat us,’ they said, ‘but don’t send us home.’ ”

Over the remainder of the first week, some of the pieces began falling into place at C.D.B. King. Liberia’s red, white and blue flag was hoisted up in the schoolyard. The children seemed to relax, and J.C. even wore shorts by the end of the week. By Friday, about 60 students had showed up.

The cowbell set the children free. Unable to find an aunt who was supposed to accompany him, J.C. began walking home, lingering in front of stores with toys. Back home, his mother laughed when asked about her son’s short pants and sleeves, with the mittens nowhere in sight.

“We’re afraid-o,” she said. “Ebola is still here.”

伊波拉疫情趨緩 賴比瑞亞復學

賴比瑞亞伊波拉病毒疫情趨緩，政府下令學校復學，然而家長擔心疫情未徹底消失，不敢貿然把孩子送到學校。

賴比瑞亞衛生部副部長奈斯瓦表示，該國已有十二天未出現新確診病例。儘管脫離疫區指日可待，賴國政府仍不敢掉以輕心，持續追蹤一百零二名疑似病例。

民意代表、教育官員和家長爭論，政府應該在全國確定脫離疫區，即連續四十二天未出現新確診病例，再宣布學校恢復上課。但如此一來開學日將延後至少一個半月，教學進度勢必落後。政府原訂開學日為二月二日，在爭議下一延再延，最後確定二月十六日開學。

雖然伊波拉疫情趨緩，但賴比瑞亞出現兩百名學童感染百日咳病例，讓家長擔心校園將成為感染的溫床。

首都蒙羅維亞的公立金恩小學原有上千學生，開學後只有卅名學生來上學。

家長的憂心其來有自。賴比瑞亞小學的設備簡陋，即使是位於首善之區的金恩小學，竟也沒有電和自來水，全校學生必須共用幾座簡陋的廁所，這樣的環境在伊波拉病毒肆虐時不堪一擊。

雖然私立小學設備較好，但伊波拉疫情重創賴比瑞亞經濟，許多家長無力負擔昂貴的私立小學學費，只能把小孩送到免學費的公立小學就讀。原本擔任幼稚園教師的米雅塔．法布雷因此沒了工作，原本讓九歲兒子上私校的她，改讀金恩小學。送兒子上學時她殷殷叮嚀「不要和別人接觸，不要喝別人的水，不要碰任何人」。

校方也嚴陣以待。金恩小學副校長維諾瑞亞．克雷頓早上在校門口為學生量體溫並監督他們洗手，朝會時說：「伊波拉摧毀我們的家園，帶給我們傷心和痛苦。有些鄰居死掉了，對吧？有些鄰居小孩死掉了，對吧？但你還在這裡。如果想活下去，那麼關於伊波拉的事絕不能說謊隱瞞。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/world/africa/trickle-of-liberian-children-returning-to-school-reflects-lingering-ebola-fears.html

2015-03-06．聯合報．A17．國際．編譯莊蕙嘉