The Children of Ebola: Meet the girls and boys who reveal how courage and kindness helped them endure 2015

The year began with the deadliest Ebola epidemic ever seen. It ends with Sierra Leone, the worst-affected country, finally free of the disease yet 20,000 children orphaned in the region. Film-maker Ben Steele travelled to West Africa to meet the remarkable boys and girls rebuilding their broken families

Celebrations last month in the capital as Sierra Leone is declared Ebola-free (AP)

Last month, Sierra Leone, the country at the centre of the most recent Ebola outbreak, was finally declared free of the highly contagious and deadly disease. There, and in the neighbouring countries of Liberia and Guinea, around 11,300 people died over the course of two years in the world's worst Ebola epidemic.

As catastrophic as the outbreak was to West Africa, a year ago many feared it might develop into an even worse situation. In December 2014, Sierra Leone teetered on the brink of disaster. In a country with a population of six million, more than 40 people were dying a day; that month, total fatalities almost doubled. The country's fragile health service lay in ruins, and more than 100 frontline medical staff were dead. The disease had reached the capital, Freetown, and infections were spreading along the city's seafront slums.

In an attempt to halt its spread, a nationwide state of emergency was strictly enforced. Travel was heavily restricted and armed soldiers manned checkpoints on all roads between towns, taking the temperatures of anyone who wanted to pass through. Shops opened only in daylight hours. Public gatherings and football matches were banned. Religious services were subject to heavy restrictions. Every school was closed.

Shocking images of hazmat-suited medics trying to assist the afflicted, but unable to offer an actual cure, stunned the world. It felt like a dystopian nightmare: 4x4 pick-up trucks with body teams drove into communities to collect the dead. Corpses were sprayed with chlorine to stop infection and sealed in body bags, the faces of the body teams hidden behind respirators and goggles as terrified relatives howled with grief.

International media focused on the danger that the outbreak could become pandemic. The fear reached its height when Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian national visiting family in Texas, became the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the US, and died in October 2014, while two nurses treating him tested positive for the virus (though both made full recoveries). Initially complacent, politicians around the world began to react, accelerating medical research, imposing tight monitoring of people arriving at international airports from affected countries, and, most importantly, trying to help contain the crisis in West Africa.

Ebola is a particularly brutal disease in part because it turns family members into a biohazard. It is spread by bodily contact, and because health services in West Africa are severely limited, many people expect their loved ones to look after them when they fall ill. Worse, the Ebola virus doesn't die with its infected victim. In a region where professional undertakers are virtually unheard of, family members are expected to wash and prepare their relations for burial, honouring them with a family service. This meant that Ebola ravaged families and households throughout Sierra Leone.

Among the many tragic outcomes was the orphaning of more than 20,000 children. I wanted to know what was happening to those children as their mothers, fathers and siblings died, and their communities were torn apart.

In January 2014, not long after the country recorded its highest spike in new Ebola cases, I boarded a plane bound for Sierra Leone. Over the course of four months, I spent time with a handful of remarkable children, filming for a Channel 4 documentary about them. Here are the stories of three of the individuals I met…

'The Children Who Beat Ebola' will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 11pm on Tuesday

Abu on his first day back at school, in April (Ben Steele)

ABU

Abu lives in an idyllic valley in the foothills of the mountains that give Sierra Leone its name (“Sierra Lyoa” meaning “Lion Mountains” in Portuguese). He's a 12-year-old with a broad smile and the aura of a grown- up, whose favourite subjects – before the authorities closed his school in June 2014 – were English and science.

When I first meet him in January 2015, he's coping with the fact that Ebola has claimed eight members of his family. A neighbour has taken him in, for while Abu himself is not infected, he cannot return to his home, which lies within a quarantined zone in his village.

The quarantine zone is almost impossible to spot: there are no biohazard signs, no hazmat suits here; rather, a thin blue cord stretching around a dozen buildings is all that separates infected homes from the rest of the community. From the top of a hill, half-a-dozen armed Sierra Leone infantry survey the village, armed with semi-automatic rifles.

Below them, in the soft evening light, smoke lifts from cooking pots. There is no electricity, sewage or mains water in the community, so Abu collects water from the stream. It is here that he explains the chain of events that led to eight members of his family dying within as many weeks. “The first time I heard about Ebola, we were at home. Our grandmother died. Then my brother was sick and died, and my mother and father, and my uncle.” Abu was fortunate; the day before, he tells me, he was given the “all clear” and released from an Ebola isolation unit that lies an hour's drive away.

By March 2014, the quarantine has been lifted in the village, and one of Abu's surviving aunts and uncle face the heartbreaking dilemma of how best to care for three children orphaned by Ebola – Abu, his 13-year-old adopted brother, Adbul, and two-year-old baby Fatmata, his cousin. With three mouths to feed, it is decided that the baby will stay with them, Abu's brother will be sent to relatives in another village, and Abu will be sent to his mother's sister in the capital.

Many children have not been so fortunate. The stigma of Ebola is so potent that certain orphans have been rejected by their extended families. Figures are hard to collate, but the UK charity Street Child reports that children across Sierra Leone have been forced from their homes, with many sleeping rough on the streets and some turning to prostitution to make ends meet. There is no effective state help.

Abu is one of the lucky ones. A few days later, when he arrives at his relatives' home in the capital, carrying a single bag with all of his possessions, voices call out to greet him. The head of the household, a tall, clean-shaven man, puts a hand on Abu's shoulder and gestures to his wife: “This is your mother now. You know your father is dead, your mother is dead. This is now your mother; you should be close to her. Don't forget this, OK?”

Abu's aunt embraces him then leads him inside to show him his new home. Abu will sleep on a mattress on the floor in a room with five others, but he will be brought up within a loving family. His new mother starts to prepare Abu's first hot meal of the day: rice with stewed cassava leaves.

I next see Abu in April 2015, when it is hoped that the schools will reopen soon. He has spent his days helping on his aunt's market stall, selling shoes. He misses his brother, who he hasn't seen since the move, but it's clear that the big city streets are starting to feel like home. After checking that his aunt is out of earshot, he tells me: “My aunt is a good person. She treats me like my mother.”

On 14 April, schools reopen nationwide. There are six new Ebola cases in the same week, but the government gambles that the worst is over. On his way to class for the first time in 10 months, Abu can scarcely contain his joy. “I'm excited!” he tells me, proud of his new uniform and rucksack.

At his new school, hundreds of boys in dark green shorts and matching shirts career around the dusty yard. The headmistress rings a bell and they fall into line. After a quick rendition of the national anthem, the children line up to wash their hands, while teachers with government-issue thermometers check that no one has a temperature.

Later that afternoon, before I leave, Abu is excused from class and comes out to say goodbye. I can see he wants to say something important. “I made new friends, we are playing,” he tells me. “Here, I'm not scared. I'm not scared of Ebola.” Ebola protocol means we're not allowed to shake hands, so we wave goodbye instead.

Abu has continued to thrive at school during 2015 and regularly meets up with his brother.

Mariama, Michael and their sister Mikaela celebrate the re-opening of school, Moyamba Junction, April (Ben Steele)

Michael & Mariama

Twelve-year-old Michael is an ambitious student who lives in the market town of Moyamba Junction, in the wide-open plains of central Sierra Leone.

When I arrive in March 2015, the market remains closed, but tensions have eased after a spate of Ebola deaths. Asked how the virus arrived, people point towards a well-kept bungalow set back from the road, next door to a padlocked pharmacy and two-bed health clinic.

Across the region, Ebola has infected more than 800 health workers and claimed the lives of almost 500 medics. Michael's father was the town pharmacist and the first to die of suspected Ebola in his community, in September 2014. Back then, amid confusion about the severity of Ebola, Michael's relatives decided to give his father, chairman of the local church, the traditional, Christian burial they felt a man of his status deserved.

On the family laptop, Michael watches a home video of his dad's body being dressed and gently laid to rest in an open coffin. “When they were dressing him I did not enter, because when they sprayed the room I would not have been able to bear the smell of chlorine.”

Because of the high status of Michael's father, almost the entire town attended the funeral. To this day, the family don't believe that Michael's father died of Ebola, but the rest of the community pinpoints this as the moment the virus spread through Moyamba Junction.

Michael stops the video every few seconds to point at relatives, neighbours, friends: “This one is dead. This one is dead. Also this one.” Michael still sleeps on the bed on which his father died, the bed where his relatives prepared his father's body for burial.

The tragedy of Ebola is that an act of love can turn into a death sentence. The virus is at its most contagious immediately after death. As a result, 80 per cent of all Ebola cases in the recent West Africa outbreak have been linked to traditional family burials.

In all, 16 members of Michael's family contracted Ebola. Just four beat the disease: Michael, his mum, his eight-year-old sister Mikaela, and 15-year-old sister Mariama. When they fell ill, the children were separated from their mother and taken by ambulance to the Médecins Sans Frontières Ebola management centre in Kailahun, nine hours' drive away. For the next three or four weeks, the children lived inside the isolation unit. There is no effective medication against Ebola, but their symptoms of fever, vomiting and diarrhoea were treated and they were kept hydrated and given regular meals. There were times when survival seemed impossible. “I believed I was going to die,” recalls Michael. “Usually every day people would die; three, four every day.”

Michael and his friend Robert help clean out their classroom two days before the school re-opens (Ben Steele)

When Michael and his sisters did eventually return to their town, in late 2014, they felt the community had turned against them, as few visitors welcomed them back: neighbours, friends, and the congregation from the local church all kept their distance. “We had been stigmatised and blamed for bringing Ebola to this town,” recalls Michael's mother.

Mariama was hit hardest: “At first when I was discharged, when I came here, I regretted surviving,” she says. Mariama felt the congregation blamed her father for bringing Ebola to the community and she hasn't been to church since. “I lost my faith,” she says.

Michael, by contrast, has had a more positive experience. Before he died, Michael's father urged his son to remain faithful: “My father said that if anything happens, I shouldn't go anywhere, I should continue to go to church.” Michael continues to serve as an altar boy. Each Sunday, dressed in a flowing white robe, he unlocks the church and carefully sets up the bright orange buckets used by the congregation to wash their hands. His persistence has paid off, and the congregation has now fully welcomed him back.

Today, Michael, who has done well in his end-of-term exams, is looking forward to celebrating Christmas. Mariama, meanwhile, has moved to a new secondary school, and feels more optimistic about her future.