Published The Independent 2015. Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, there is an abandoned cemetery where no one has been buried for decades. The walls aren’t there to confine the dead, but to keep out the living – people whom Liberian society have forgotten who inhabit its crumbling tombs. In the wake of Liberia’s Ebola epidemic, a cemetery seems the last place people would live. The West African nation has become synonymous with a deadly virus that tallied almost10,000 cases in the country from March2014. Ebola kills indiscriminately and is contracted through bodily fluids. Dead bodies are particularly contagious. But before 2003, it was pictures of slaughtered families and child soldiers that flooded the media during the country’s 14-year civil war. It is this earlier, lawless Liberia that first prompted people to flee to the city-centre cemetery. Poverty and the fall-out of war led a group of young people to remove human remains from the graves where they now live in squalid conditions- in this feature we look into their lives.
