MONROVIA, Liberia — Schools are set to reopen Monday across Liberia
after the deadly Ebola outbreak forced them shut last year, and the
principal of West Point township's only public elementary and junior
high school said all the furniture needs to be burned.
As recently
as last month, the N.V. Massaquoi school was used to screen sick people
for Ebola, which has killed more than 3,800 people in Liberia and
ravaged the neighboring West African countries of Sierra Leone and
Guinea.
The school has been disinfected — it smells heavily of
chlorine — but Principal M. Gleh Mason II said that's not enough.
Patients sat on the wooden benches and chairs, and he wants all the
furniture replaced.
That is the most pressing need, and one
virtually impossible to complete by Monday, when the Ministry of
Education has said the country's 5,100 schools will open. Mason also
wants the roof fixed and the building repainted.
At the height of
the epidemic last year, residents in West Point — one of the Liberian
capital's poorest and most crowded neighborhoods — watched every day as
the sick were brought into the school, and the dead were carried out.
"People
died within the building. So for that reason, every thought about the
school became a very different one. It changed perception," Mason said
while sitting in the schoolyard over the weekend.
He said he hopes
a renovation will make residents think of the long, narrow concrete
building, with its pocked corrugated metal roof that lets sunlight
through, as a school again.
Liberia
has recorded only a handful of new confirmed infections each week for
the past few weeks, according to the World Health Organization.
Restarting schools, which have been closed since the summer break, is
one of the most potent signs that the epidemic is waning.
Yet many
fear the government is too eager to declare victory against an
unconquered virus. Schools were supposed to reopen Feb. 2, but the
Ministry of Education pushed back the date to give them more time to put
safety measures in place.
Many schools may not open Monday. More
than half of the country's schools don't have easy access to running
water, according to Steve Morgan, the Liberia director for Save the
Children, which is working with 500 schools to help them reopen.
Without
water, even rudimentary hand-washing facilities are difficult to
install, and they're a critical ministry requirement to prevent
spreading the virus.
This weekend, officials were rushing
thermometers, buckets and chlorine to schools in hard-to-reach
counties, according to Shannor Goe, the Ministry of Education's deputy
director of communication.
Even schools ready to open face major
challenges. More than 4,500 children in Liberia lost a primary caregiver
to Ebola, according to the United Nations Children's Fund, and
thousands of those students will be sitting in classrooms. Students who
haven't cracked a book in seven months need to be brought up to speed.
The economy is devastated, so many parents fear they won't be able to
afford uniforms or books for their children, though many organizations
donate these items.
Some parents remain skeptical. Massa Madave,
who has nine children at Kpallah Public School on the outskirts of
Monrovia, said she wouldn't send her youngest two — ages 4 and 8 — at
least on the first day. Small children touch each other too much when
they play, she explained.
Ebola is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids, and "no touching" has been the rule in Liberia for months.
These
concerns come on top of the enormous challenges that face Liberia's
schools, including some of the world's lowest primary school enrollment
and highest dropout rates. Many teachers weren't trained properly,
classrooms were overcrowded, and students left school unprepared, Morgan
of Save the Children said. In 2013, none of the 25,000 students who
took the entrance exam for the University of Liberia passed.
Still,
kids seem desperate to get back to the classroom. Jacob Quasah, 15, who
watched his friends play soccer next door to Massaquoi, shouted to a
group visiting the school to ask if they were bringing supplies so he
could go back to class.
Sheldon
Yett with UNICEF, which provided hygiene supplies for Liberia's
schools, said schools can offer important support to students after all
they've been through with the Ebola outbreak. But he acknowledged that
even one case of a child getting sick with the virus would set the
country back.
Those risks are too high for Arochelaus Nagbe, a
community leader in West Point and a father of two Massaquoi students.
He laughed off the suggestion that a hand-washing station is enough to
assuage his concerns.
"Washing the hands is good if then you enter
into a clean place," he said in the schoolyard. At Massaquoi, "washing
hands would be meaningless."
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