As Red Cross workers remove for cremation the body of 22-year-old Isatu Baryougar, possibly dead of Ebola, her sister, Princess Baryougar, sits on the ground grief-stricken in a Monrovia slum Monday.(Photo: Sawmar Fallah, for USA TODAY)
MONROVIA, Liberia — This is a city that desperately wants to shake off Ebola and get on with life.
The massive billboards warning of infection and imploring people to wash their hands and monitor fevers still loom everywhere, but they've lost visual punch, fading into the kaleidoscope of a busy cityscape.
A population warned about physical proximity touches and holds hands and elbows, crowding together as readily as in any other teeming metropolis. Children scatter across intersections, hawking wrapped candies or fried plantains through car windows. Motorcyclists dart through traffic, weighed down with paying riders who cling tightly for dear life, four to a bike.
Where major paved arteries give way to capillaries of rutted dirt roads and congested neighborhoods, the poor populations seem too busy for the measures aimed at defeating Ebola.
"Let's be realistic," U.S. Ambassador Deborah Malac says. "It's very hard for human beings to bear down and focus so intensely over an extremely long period of time. It becomes difficult. It's hard on people."
The epidemic has eased in Liberia, but it isn't over. Nearby Sierra Leone and Guinea remain in the thick of the disease. In Monrovia, living with a virus that kills 60% of those it infects, even if the infection rate has dropped, cannot become "the new normal," says Kevin DeCock, head of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team.
"The danger is of complacency," he worries, "accepting the unacceptable."
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When the epidemic was at its worst in this capital city, as bodies lay in the streets and the sick lined up at overflowing treatment clinics, people saw the sickness as an imminent danger and responded. Now, Ebola is largely tucked out of sight in partially filled clinics, or it claims individual victims lost in vast slums.
As it has from the beginning, the Red Cross moves out in convoys to recover and incinerate bodies to fight Ebola.
Because Monrovians are so eager to put the crisis behind them, the process of body removal is becoming trickier and even threatening at times, says Victor Lacken, a Red Cross spokesman.
I joined a retrieval effort Monday in Paynesville, a sector that was true to the sound of its name on that day. The family of Isatu Baryougar, 22, who died Sunday, five days after falling ill, was an emotional wreck. The relatives stood together in a small clutch, eyes wet with tears.
Isatu's sister, Princess Baryougar, went from tears to hysteria as her sister's body was carried away in an orange body bag by moon-suited Red Cross workers. She ran, leaping into the air until she finally collapsed on the ground, a blank look on her face, as the bag was lifted into the back of a Red Cross Nissan pickup.
Her personal devastation was only the beginning. Members of her family shouted at one another in a dispute over whether Isatu's body should be taken.
The cultural tradition is burial, and some relatives were enraged about the decision to give up her body to the Red Cross for cremation.
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As workers began the tedious process of safely removing their protective suits, rinsing with chlorine and water to guard against infection, scores from the neighborhood gathered in the dirt pathways between homes, and their angry murmurings grew louder.
Some said it was unclear what killed Isatu Baryougar, that it may not have been Ebola. The mere presence of Red Cross trucks, which had arrived with sirens blaring, stigmatized the neighborhood, marking its residents as people to be shunned.
This was unfair, some called out. One man stepped forward, belligerently demanding that the Red Cross leave immediately.
"They don't call us the Red Cross anymore," Lacken said, nervously eyeing the growing dissent. "They call us the Ebola people."
Monrovians don't want Ebola around any more. They want to move on.
Zoroya covers the impact of war and climate change for USA TODAY
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