May 8th 2015 and it’s been 42 days since the last person died from Ebola. The epidemic of haemorrhagic fever is finally over.
Béatrice Yardolo is the last person in Liberia to have survived the virus.

At the beginning of March, Béatrice Yardolo returned home to her district on the outskirts of Monrovia… She had just left an Ebola treatment unit, an ETU, where she was the only patient…

Béatrice Yardolo, Ebola survivor (in English)
I was very much afraid because my two sons had died already at the centre. And then I've been carried over there. So I was very much afraid.
I was the only person there.
I was all by myself. I would only sit on a chair. When I was tired, I would go and lie down. Then I would get up and walk around a bit. It was so hard for me to be all alone by myself for that number of days. Finally I recovered and they discharged me.

Béatrice also had to cope with being shunned by her community… When her relatives began to fall ill, the whole family was placed in quarantine and some neighbours wouldn’t let them get water from the well. (sinon: refused them access to the well.)

Aquilla Bembo Bealeh (in English)
For me, what I and my children decided to do, to supply them with water, encourage them, despite we were not going closer to them. We used to tell them to bring the buckets out, line them up, and then we would bring water and empty it into their containers, and they would carry them in (…) Sometimes the old man would come out, I would be standing there and sometimes I used to see the sorrow and the grief inside him and I would encourage him that when there's life, there's hope, and encourage him that even if his wife is at the ETU, we trust that God will bring her back. And we bless God that she came back.

Like many other Ebola survivors, Béatrice now suffers from headaches and pain in her joints…
She’s hoping to find work so that she can provide for her family—and her granddaughter who was born while the family were in quarantine.

Béatrice Yardolo, Ebola survivor (in English)
I was teaching. But I didn’t want to continue teaching. Moreover, when I came from the hospital, I had problems with my head. Teaching requires a lot of concentration when you are about to plan a lesson, working on grades, it can do something to the brain. So my head is not set for teaching now. It adds stress, dealing with children. One of my fears to return to the classroom was, coming from the ETU and people, the stigma. I was afraid parents would complain about somebody from an Ebola centre teaching their children, many people would not send their children. So to avoid all of these things, I decided to be by myself.

Béatrice would like to open a shop… But the Liberian economy continues to suffer the consequences of the epidemic—unemployment, price increases…
Trade is still slow here in this market in Monrovia. These women are the worst affected as the bush-meat they used to sell is now banned because it can carry the virus. Their stock has been confiscated and they don’t have much else to sell to eke out a living.
But, in the capital, there are unmistakable signs of life returning to normal —particularly for the children, who couldn’t go to school between July and February. Washing their hands in chlorinated water and having their temperature checked at the school gate have become part of everyday life.