As Ebola Ebbs in Africa, Focus Turns From Death to Life

MONROVIA, Liberia — Life is edging back to normal after the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history.

At the height of the epidemic, Liberians met horrific deaths inside the blue-painted walls of the Nathaniel V. Massaquoi Elementary School, as classrooms became Ebola holding centers and the education of a nation’s children, shuttered in their homes for safety, was abruptly suspended.

Now, parents are streaming into the schoolyard once again, not to visit their stricken loved ones, but with their restless children in tow, to register for the start of classes in a delayed and shortened academic year.

Eager to learn and to play with her friends again, Florence Page, 11, bounded ahead, brimming with pent-up energy, as her mother, Mabel Togba, paused to look warily into the school building through its padlocked metal screen doors.

“They still haven’t told us that Liberia is free of Ebola, so I’m still afraid,” said Ms. Togba, 42. “But it’s better than to leave my children at home doing nothing.”

New Ebola cases in Liberia, where streets were littered with the dead just a few months ago, now number in the single digits, according to the World Health Organization. In neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea, the other two nations in the Ebola hot zone, new cases have fallen sharply in the last month, dropping to fewer than 100 in a week at the end of January — a level not seen in the region since June.

With a virus as deadly as Ebola, officials warn that the epidemic will not be over until cases reach zero in all three countries. But after nearly 9,000 deaths from the disease, the W.H.O. announced last week that it was focusing on a goal that had seemed out of reach for much of last year: ending the Ebola epidemic, no longer simply slowing its spread.

Here in Monrovia, the capital, ambulances and body collection vehicles that once barreled through the streets are a rare sight. Soccer matches are now played throughout the city on weekend mornings. Buckets filled with chlorine water are gone from most entrances, or sit empty. People can be seen shaking hands once again, squeezing into taxis and touching during conversations, as the fear of the virus ebbs and Liberians slip back into their daily, tactile rhythm.

But Ebola has not been in Barkedu for more than 90 days, she said. And the protective bubble that Liberians had erected around themselves to avoid touching others and possibly become infected had dissolved.

“The ladies were dancing, we were all much closer together,” she said. “It was much more normal, and I wasn’t really particularly concerned that someone might touch me.”

At the Mary Brownell Junior High School in Monrovia, many Liberian parents have re-enrolled their children despite their lingering fears of Ebola. Classes, originally scheduled to resume on Feb. 2, are now expected to start in mid-February.

Joseph Garway, 46, came to register a son. He has three children, but he now also takes care of four more: the children of a cousin who, along with his wife, died of Ebola last August. “We are worried, but still we want our children to go back to school,” he said. “If we don’t do that, our children will be left behind, and the country will not be well.”

Felicia Koneh, who wakes up at 3 a.m. to bake shortbread and sells her goods on the streets or in schools, saw her daily sales of $16 fall to $6 during the height of the epidemic. In the last couple of months, though, they have risen slowly to $12, and Ms. Koneh hoped that the reopening of schools would lift her sales further. “Little by little,” she said, “things are returning to what they were like before Ebola.”

Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Freetown, Sierra Leone, Helene Cooper from Washington, and Sheri Fink from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 1, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Ebola Ebbs, Focus Turns From Death to Life. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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