Horror and despair in Monrovia mental home
About 30 ragged patients are still crowded inside Monrovia's Holy Ghost Mental Home, a two-room complex of stone floors and shot-out windows. Ninety-two residents were there on July 21 when insurgents entered the home after overwhelming government fighters holding a nearby bridge. An August 18 peace deal, backed by West African peacekeepers and US forces, has brought a tense peace to the city. But it hasn't brought back the home's 60 missing patients, who are thought to be wandering Monrovia's war-shattered streets.
"The war has just ended and I'm trying to bring them back. I take a taxi and go look for them every day," said Rev Mother Philomena Onuchi, the 51-year old Nigerian nun who has run the institute since its inception eight years ago.
"Ask me my first name. Ask me my first name," shrilled Wohkleh, one young man at the home. He refused to give his first name.
He stood on a filthy mattress, his leg connected to a bed by a rusty chain chafing his ankle. The elderly woman pirouetted slowly, while the others lay motionless and unresponsive amid human filth.
Some of the inmates broke away at the sound of fighting, disappearing into the chaos. Others ran when rebels told them it wasn't safe.
Some of those who stayed behind were caught in the crossfire, like many of the city's residents. In one room, two young orderlies dressed patients' slowly healing bullet wounds a bloodied knee and an eye oozing pus and squabbled with their charges, one of whom stood rigid in the corner, clad only in fouled thermal underwear.
In many remote parts of Africa, health care is poor, education stops early and mental health treatment for disorders often taken as evidence of sorcery is unheard of.
Many who should be under care wander alone, and poor governments generally do little.
Rev Mother Onuchi a nurse who claims some training in mental disabilities says she opened the Holy Ghost home with help from Liberia's government, and on orders from higher authorities. "In a call from God in 1995, he anointed me in my sleep," Rev Mother Onuchi said. "He established this ministry himself."
Over the years, the home grew with donations of food and medicine from aid groups, though materials have always been scarce.
"I use prayer first, then second I give them drugs," said Rev Mother Onuchi.
Funding initially came from the government, but that stopped in 2001 as Liberia's economy sank under former warlord and ex-President Charles Taylor, who launched a seven-year civil war in 1989 and was elected president in 1997.
Rebels took up arms against Taylor two years later and set siege to Monrovia in June. On July 21, the insurgents burst across a key bridge near the Holy Ghost home.
"The rebels came and scattered everyone," said Rev Mother Onuchi.
She managed to stay on, restraining many of the remaining patients in chains a necessary precaution to keep aggressive charges from harming each other, she says.
Fighting left the home pitted with bullet holes. A sieve-like roof now leaks rainwater.
In early August, a West African peacekeeping mission landed in Monrovia, easing the rebels from town. Taylor stepped down and went into exile in Nigeria and the government and insurgents signed a peace deal afterward. Peacekeepers now patrol the contested bridge, but the home has received almost no aid since the fighting broke out.
Conditions in the home are ghastly, but for the mentally ill, it's still better than the street, said Steve McElroy, a volunteer doctor with the French aid group Medecins sans Frontieres.
"That's about as depressing as you can get," Mr McElroy said after a tour of the home. "They're doing the best they can with no money. They're feeding them, at least."
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