One small town in Liberia has been so badly ravaged by Ebola that every single child has been left without his or her mother.
The tragedy in the village of Joeblow began at a traditional funeral for a prominent woman. As is customary, all of the village women bathed in the water used to clean the deceased woman, Street Child Founder Tom Dannatt explained to HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski on Tuesday.
"They got Ebola, one by one ... and literally the entire [population of] young women of that village were wiped out," Dannatt said. "When my colleague arrived in that village in December, what she saw was a couple of old ladies, a couple of grandmas, just looking after a village full of children. The men were in the field working, and, you know, this is the sort of extraordinary sight that Ebola is creating."
Chloe Brett, who also works with Street Child, told The Telegraph, "It's now a village of no mothers and very confused children with blank looks on their faces."
UNICEF estimates as many as 10,000 children have lost at least one parent to Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Ebola "tends to rip through whole families," Dannatt said, adding that when children are orphaned by the disease, their possessions are burned during the disinfection process.
"So you’ve got no relatives, no possessions, and your best chance is that your aunt, your uncle will take you in. It'll typically also be a very poor family," Dannatt said. "It really is one of the saddest human conditions you could possibly imagine."
