Center for Innovation in Media

Ebola Took Her Daughters And Made Her An Outcast

"When you say Ebola," says Amanda Ellis, "everybody will run."

Ellis is 79. She’s sitting in a blue plastic chair in the dirt yard in front of her house, in a rural area outside Liberia’s capital city of Monrovia. She looks worn out. She has lost five members of her family to the virus that has claimed over 1,400lives in her homeland and in neighboring countries.

Ellis’ daughter Thelmorine was the first to go. She was 58. She contracted Ebola after taking care of a friend who was infected at a hospital where both of them worked as nurses.

When Thelmorine got sick, her sister Rose came over to her house to tend to her. That’s how Rose got infected.

Ellis says she was there when her daughter Rose showed the first symptoms. She points to a small, white-washed house a few yards from her own. Rose lived there with her husband.

Rose told her mother she had stomachache. Ellis gave her warm water to drink and took her to a clinic several times.

But Rose’s decline was swift. “She come into the bathroom to take a bath and just dropped,” Ellis recalls.

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Photo: Amanda Ellis, 79, lost five members of her family to Ebola. Now, nobody will buy the mangoes that used provide her income. She must rely instead on handouts.

Image: David Gregory speaks during the 2014 Matrix Awards at The Waldorf Astoria in April in New York City. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images)

Today’s top book news item:

In the eight days since Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old, was killed by a police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, what began as an impromptu vigil evolved into a sustained protest; it is now beginning to look like a movement.

The local QuikTrip, a gas station and convenience store that was looted and burned on the second night of the protests, has now been repurposed as the epicenter for gatherings and the exchange of information. The front of the lot bears an improvised graffiti sign identifying the area as the “QT People’s Park.”

With the exception of a few stretches, such as Thursday afternoon, when it was veiled in clouds of tear gas, protesters have been a constant presence in the lot. On Sunday afternoon the area was populated by members of local churches, black fraternity and sorority groups, Amnesty International, the Outcast Motorcycle Club, and twenty or so white supporters from the surrounding area.

On the north side of the station, a group of volunteers with a mobile grill served free hot dogs and water, and a man stood on a crate, handing out bright yellow T-shirts with the logo of the National Action Network, the group led by Al Sharpton.

The conversation here has shifted from the immediate reaction to Michael Brown’s death and toward the underlying social dynamics. Two men I spoke with pointed to the disparity in education funding for Ferguson and more affluent municipalities nearby.

Another talked about being pulled over by an officer who claimed to smell marijuana in the car as a pretense for searching him.

“I’m in the United States Navy,” he told me. “We have to take drug tests in the military so I had proof that there were no drugs in my system. But other people can’t do that.”

Six black men I spoke to, nearly consecutively, pointed to Missouri’s felon-disfranchisement laws as part of the equation.

“If you’re a student in one of the black schools here and you get into a fight you’ll probably get arrested and charged with assault. We have kids here who are barred from voting before they’re even old enough to register,” one said.

Ferguson’s elected officials did not look much different than they had years earlier, when it was a largely white community.