MONROVIA, Liberia — First, 16-year-old Promise Cooper’s mother complained of a hurting head and raging fever, and she died days later on the way to a hospital.
The next month, her father developed the same headache and fever, and her baby brother grew listless.
That’s when Promise knew this was not malaria.
She had heard about Ebola on the radio. When she tended to her father, she washed her hands afterward. Desperate to keep her three other younger siblings safe, she urged them to play outside and stay away from their one-room home.
Yet she was powerless before an invisible enemy, as her family of seven disintegrated around her.
In the meantime, neighbors and relatives were starting to become suspicious. No one came by to check on the kids, not even their grandparents.
Word, like the virus, spread in Liberia’s capital: The Coopers had Ebola.
In Liberia’s large, deeply religious families, there is usually an aunty willing to take in a child who has lost a parent. But Ebola — and the fear of contagion and death it elicits — is unraveling those bonds.
At least 3,700 children across Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have lost one or more parents to Ebola, according to the U.N. children’s agency. That figure is expected to double by mid-October. Many of these children are left to fend for themselves and continue to live inside infected houses.
Sickness spreads
At the Cooper home, tiny Success lost his battle with Ebola at 5 months old, long before he could live up to the expectations of his name. By the time an ambulance came to collect the corpse, along with Promise’s father, 11-year-old Emmanuel Jr. had fallen sick.
After watching them all packed into the back of the ambulance, Promise was now alone with Benson, 15, and Ruth, 13.
She could not afford a phone call to see how their father and brother were doing. A taxi to the Ebola clinic across town cost even more. An uncle stopped by to drop off money but left without touching them for fear of infection.
Promise resolved to keep the family together until her father came back. She used what little cash she had to buy plastic bags of drinking water to resell. Day after day, though, no customers came.
If the children sat down somewhere, people would spray bleach after they got up. When they tried to buy something with what little money they had, vendors refused to serve them. Women took the long path to the well to avoid the house.
“Why don’t you want to talk to me? Why, God, does nobody want to come around? We are human beings,” Promise sobbed.
Finally, she scraped together enough change from a cousin to take a taxi to the Ebola clinic to check on her father. She and Ruth paced outside the barbed-wire- topped walls of the clinic for what felt like hours, waiting for an answer on when he would be coming home.
Then a security guard came back: Emmanuel Cooper Sr. was dead.
The girls broke down sobbing. No one could tell them if 11-year-old Emmanuel was alive, either.
Even as Promise mourned her parents, a community leader named Kanyean Molton Farley took the children under his wing. Farley did human rights research by day and tried to help the neighborhood’s orphaned children by night.
He worried that Promise could fall prey to an older man. At 16 and hungry, she was vulnerable to abuse.
“The story of the Cooper children touched my gut, and I never stopped coming back,” Farley said one morning, as he dropped off soap for the children.
Then the Cooper children caught another lucky break: Promise saw her brother’s face on television among government photos of children who had survived Ebola at the city’s clinics but were still separated from their families.
“It’s him, it’s him!” she told Farley. Off they went to get Emmanuel — the first in the family to survive the plague sweeping their neighborhood.
But not long after Emmanuel came home, Ruth became feverish. How could this happen again?
Promise called Farley again. He couldn’t get them an ambulance until morning because of the curfew, so he told her to use mattresses as room dividers in the bedroom where they all slept. Ruth would stay on one side. The healthy children would sleep on the other.
Now it was just Promise and the boys.
Starting to heal
The children slept in their parents’ bed instead of crowding on the floor below, as they had in their previous life. Some nights, her brothers would weep for their mother, and Promise tried to be firm but caring.
“I tell them Ma and Pa are no more, and that they shouldn’t worry about that,” she says. “We must concentrate on living our lives.”
A few weeks ago, their aunt Helen came around to the house — the first family member to do so in months. Now she, too, is shunned.
“I have to come back because everyone has abandoned them,” says Helen Kangbo, breastfeeding her 1-year-old daughter, Faith, after joining her nieces and nephews for a paltry dinner of rice. “I must have the courage to come.”
There has been other good news for the Cooper children: After three weeks, 13-year-old Ruth is better. She is still weak, so she is staying with Farley’s family.
In their house, there is little trace left of dead loved ones because authorities have burned their parents’ clothing. The only photos of their parents are on their voter ID cards. The only reminder of Success is two bottles of baby powder, still sitting on a table.
