Liberia (Continuación)

"Every day, we cried" -- these were the words spoken over and over to me by a colleagues as we sat down after another long day for a rare drink in Monrovia, Liberia's bustling capital.

She was reminiscing about the period in September and October when the Ebola outbreak was at its peak. "Of all the pain that we faced, the cremation was the hardest", she explained. I knew exactly what she meant -- cremation was as far away from the norm for burials in West Africa as one can imagine.

As the Ebola outbreak wanes in Liberia, it is easy to imagine the heroes as the myriad of foreign doctors, nurses, epidemiologists and logisticians that have come to support the country in their days of need, and yes, these expatriates have definitely brought to bear much knowledge, expertise and resources on controlling the outbreak.…  Seguir leyendo »

La epidemia de ébola en el África occidental está destruyendo vidas, diezmando comunidades y dejando huérfanos a niños a un ritmo que no se había visto desde las brutales guerras civiles de esa región que se acabaron hace más de un decenio. En Liberia, el 60 por ciento de los mercados están cerrados ahora; en Sierra Leona, sólo una quinta parte de los 10.000 pacientes de VIH que están en tratamientos antivirales siguen recibiéndolos y el Gobierno de Guinea está comunicando un desfase financiero de 220 millones de dólares debido a la crisis. Si no se contiene pronto el brote, la mayoría de los beneficios económicos y sociales logrados desde que se restableció la paz en Liberia y Sierra Leona y desde que se inició la transición democrática de Guinea podrían perderse.…  Seguir leyendo »

Liberians under quarantine last week due to the death of more than 20 residents of their village, Jene Wondi. Photograph: Ahmed Jallanzo/EPA

In their single-room house, in a Monrovia back street, 16-year-old Promise Cooper and her three younger sisters slept beside their father’s corpse for three days. After hearing rumours about her sick father, neighbours had turned away Promise’s pleas for help lest she pass Ebola on to them. Eventually, health officials removed the body, along with the Coopers’ belongings, including their bedding and clothing, and then disinfected the house with chlorine spray. The Cooper girls were left with just the clothes they were wearing and one cup of rice a generous neighbour had nervously prodded towards their door with a stick.

Promise’s story is far from unique – hundreds of stories like this have been created each month in Monrovia since May.…  Seguir leyendo »

Fighting Ebola, and the Mud

On a Monday evening last month in Liberia, at Grand Gedeh County’s main hospital, two nurses knocked on a patient’s door. The patient was being treated for malaria and typhoid, but had also recently tested positive for Ebola — though he didn’t know it yet. I was doing training on Ebola at the hospital, and had seen him from a distance just that morning. He smiled and gave me a thumbs up.

Dressed in their full Ebola combat gear — body suit, apron, head cover, face mask, goggles, face shield, boots and rubber gloves — the nurses tried to avoid alarming him by saying that they needed to take him to Monrovia, 300 miles to the northwest, for further testing.…  Seguir leyendo »

As the Ebola nightmare continues in Liberia and as we battle to contain the epidemic, it is important to look beyond the immediate crisis. Many more lives will be lost before this dreadful outbreak is beaten, but to properly honor the memory of the victims we need to ask how it happened in the first place and, more pressingly, how we can prevent it from happening again.

After 30 years of brutal civil and political unrest, Liberia was a nation reborn. We transformed our country from a failed state into a stable democracy, rebuilding its infrastructure and its education and health systems, and enjoying one of the most promising growth records in Africa.…  Seguir leyendo »

Health workers in Monrovia, Liberia in August. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

The spread of the Ebola virus across West Africa has been fast and deadly. The World Health Organization has characterized the speed and extent of the outbreak as unprecedented. To date, at least 2,288 people in the region have died, and some 4,269 confirmed or probable cases have been reported. But the global response has been underwhelming; the aid group Doctors Without Borders has characterized international efforts to tackle the crisis as “dangerously inadequate.”

Liberia has been hardest hit by the epidemic. So far the country has counted 1,224 likely Ebola deaths, of which 508 have been confirmed by laboratory testing.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el África subsahariana, todo niño con fiebre debe recibir atención médica inmediata para prevenir la muerte por paludismo o neumonía, pero, como el pánico por la propagación del ébola está cundiendo en Liberia –además de en Sierra Leona, Guinea y Nigeria–, se está relacionando cada vez más a los clínicos y las instalaciones de atención de salud con la exposición a la enfermedad. Para velar por que sigan acudiendo a recibir atención cuando la necesiten, son necesarias mejoras en los dispensarios de primera línea e inversión en la contratación de agentes de salud comunitarios para que lleguen hasta las personas vulnerables en sus hogares.…  Seguir leyendo »

When my 65-year-old mother visited my foundation’s office recently, she was covered from head to toe in a long winter coat and headdress despite it being 28C. She explained that she wanted extra protection against the Ebola virus.

As the outbreak worsened I urged my parents to leave Monrovia. But my mother, a vibrant and protective member of her community, refuses. She is the sole carer for my grandmother, a centenarian who is too frail and stubborn to travel. She stays because she loves her home and her community. She stays for Liberia.

Last year, Liberia celebrated the 10th anniversary of the end of a long and bloody civil war.…  Seguir leyendo »

Les travaux du Tribunal spécial pour la Sierra Leone (TSSL) se sont achevés jeudi dernier par la confirmation en appel de la condamnation de Charles Taylor, ancien président du Liberia, à 50 ans de prison pour sa participation aux atrocités commises par les rebelles du Revolutionary United Front (RUF) pendant la guerre civile en Sierra Leone. Cette condamnation, désormais définitive, est un événement en soi puisque c’est la première fois depuis les procès de Nuremberg qu’un ancien chef d’Etat est condamné pour des crimes internationaux devant une instance pénale internationale.

Toutefois, la dimension historique de ce verdict semble presque anecdotique au vu de son importance juridique: il existe toujours grâce à ce verdict une jurisprudence qui contrebalance celle récente émanant de la Cour d’appel du Tribunal pour l’ex-­Yougoslavie (TPIY), qui semblait rendre quasiment impossible la condamnation de responsables politiques de haut niveau pour complicité dans des crimes de guerre.…  Seguir leyendo »

As Liberia celebrates 10 years since the signing of the peace accords that ended our devastating series of civil wars, it is right to reflect upon not only the progress the country has made, but also the concurrent transformation of much of Africa.

Twenty years ago, few African countries could be considered democracies, and where elections were held, many were merely showcases for long-entrenched strongmen pretending they had public support. This was an age of coups and man-made disasters. Now, Africa is a continent dominated by young and genuine democracies with many, such as Liberia, emerging from a period of sustained conflict that severely weakened their fundamental institutions of state.…  Seguir leyendo »

It's not uncommon in African countries like Zimbabwe and Ethiopia for newspapers to be shut, and their editors jailed. But the newspaper I edit doesn’t operate in a dictatorship. We are in Liberia, the West’s poster child for postwar democracy building. Our president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is a Nobel laureate who is celebrated by the likes of Bill Gates, Warren E. Buffett and Bono and has positioned herself as a champion of a free press.

Having spent the past week in jail and now under armed guard in a hospital since I contracted malaria, I’m not feeling particularly championed.

Until it was shut down last week, my paper, FrontPage Africa, had been setting a new standard for journalism in West Africa.…  Seguir leyendo »

I remember the first time I stared corruption in the face.

It was 2010, and I was chairwoman of a Liberian government committee responsible for reforming the awarding of international scholarships. We discovered that a group of 18-year-old boys had forged their national exam records to become eligible for a scholarship to Morocco.

I wasn’t surprised; fraud has become a national pastime in Liberia. If you’re ethical and upright, you’re called stupid. If you’re ruthless, greedy and cunning, you get praised as a national hero.

In her 2006 inaugural address, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf vowed to make corruption public enemy number one, despite the country’s long history of patronage and graft.…  Seguir leyendo »

Americans love sensational stories of violence and unusual cruelty. The latest, of course, being the drug-crazed cannibalism of a Miami man, or the Canadian porn star suspected of dismembering a victim.

Yet run the name Charles Taylor by your average crime blog watcher and wait for the reaction.

Anything? Taylor is the former president of Liberia, who engineered his election into office after prevailing in the civil war he instigated. He also masterminded the massacres ofSierra Leone's civil war, where 50,000 people died, millions were forced to flee their homes and much of the country's population was mutilated — hands, feet and legs hacked off by rebels.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Monday, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was inaugurated for a second term. She is often depicted in the press as a postwar leader successfully rebuilding a country destroyed by decades of conflict. For her many admirable accomplishments, she recently shared the Nobel Peace Prize. However, unbeknown to many outside Liberia, Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf’s government may now be sowing the seeds of future conflict by handing over huge tracts of land to foreign investors and dispossessing rural Liberians.

Between 2006 and 2011, Mrs. Johnson Sirleaf granted more than a third of Liberia’s land to private investors to use for logging, mining and agro-industrial enterprises.…  Seguir leyendo »

On Saturday I was in Oslo with two of my sisters from Africa, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of — according to the Nobel Prize committee members — our “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

On Tuesday, I will be in Paris to talk more generally about the role of women in shaping Africa’s future and also to pay my respects to the man who created the prize I am taking with me back to Liberia: Alfred Nobel.

It was in Paris in November 1895 that this Swedish inventor, who made a fortune with the invention of dynamite, wrote his last will and testament leaving much of his estate to establishing the prizes that bear his name.…  Seguir leyendo »

Friday morning, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee — along with her country's president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman — was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A decade ago, this moment would have seemed unthinkable. But Gbowee's triumph, like last spring's Arab

uprisings, is a powerful reminder that in the 21st century world, change often comes from the bottom — not from a country's armies but its people.

In 2001, Liberia was in the grip of a civil war that had been going on for years and that had decimated the country. More than 100,000 people had died, many of them children, and countless women had been raped.…  Seguir leyendo »

Americans are an extraordinarily generous people. As president of Liberia, I have seen firsthand the benefits of this generosity.

From 1980 through 2003, my tiny West African nation was engulfed in conflict that left our infrastructure and economy in tatters. Many of our children missed out on an education, and we still suffer from a critical skills shortage. For nearly 25 years, our judicial system was weak. We have had to tackle a massive external debt and reestablish the rule of law and sound governance.

Even now, eight years after our civil war ended, Liberia faces a huge uphill battle. Even though we have achieved economic growth averaging 7.2 percent since 2006, the basic needs of some 60 percent of our population remain unmet.…  Seguir leyendo »

La canciller alemana, Angela Merkel, ha colocado a África firmemente en el programa de la cumbre del G-8, que se celebra esta semana. En Liberia y en toda África acogemos con beneplácito su capacidad de mando y agradecemos el apoyo del G-8 a África, en particular sus compromisos en los últimos años de reducir la carga de la deuda, duplicar la ayuda de aquí al 2010 y ampliar el acceso al comercio. Los grandes esfuerzos por parte de los africanos, junto con las inversiones del G-8 y otros asociados, están dando resultados importantes que con frecuencia pasan inadvertidos al mundo exterior.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mi país, Liberia, tiene un escudo que refleja un acontecimiento extraordinario de la historia mundial. Muestra al sol saliendo detrás de un barco del siglo XIX que transportaba africanos que habían sido esclavos en América para empezar una nueva vida aquí, en la costa oeste de África. Ese viaje fue el resultado de un movimiento de personas buenas y justas en varios países del mundo, que consideraron que la esclavitud había sido un terrible error hacia la población de África. El trabajo conjunto de esas personas para poner fin a ese error convirtió Liberia, la tierra de la libertad, en la primera república independiente de África, en 1847.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last September, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf captivated an audience at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York with descriptions of the extraordinary challenges facing her country. Sirleaf's courage and vision inspired me and a group of colleagues to commit to revitalizing the historic but dormant relationship between African Americans and Liberia. After all, Jewish Americans have been vital to Israel's welfare. African Americans should play a similar role for Liberia.

As part of our commitment, we pledged to mobilize investment capital to support Sirleaf's reconstruction efforts. This led to the creation of the $30 million Liberia Enterprise Development Fund, which is designed to make credit available to Liberian entrepreneurs working to build viable, job-creating businesses.…  Seguir leyendo »