MONROVIA, Liberia — With the energy of an explorer, Millena Nyandibo bounded between the low-slung tin roofs of homes in West Point, an informal community that day traders, taxi drivers and other hustlers of Liberia's capital call home.

She is 32, and was dressed in pale-blue hospital scrubs and black rubber boots, giving her the impunity she needs to rush through sandy alleyways whose sites and smells suggest they double as both toilets and trash bins. West Point, long neglected by any governmental authority with the resources for basic urban planning, has neither plumbing nor proper sanitation.

Nyandibo also carried a black backpack filled with latex gloves, goggles, and even a few full-body "moon suits" — the impenetrable plastic personal protective equipment (PPE) that health workers in Liberia rely on to keep them safe from Ebola. Her colleague, Rachel Janteh, kept up the pace, despite a fatter backpack full of drugs.

"Come on!" Nyandibo hollered, hopping into a huge puddle. "I want you to see my boyfriend!"

A shy 12-year-old boy named Abraham, who has never actually had a girlfriend, was sitting on his porch. When he heard Nyandibo teasing him, he looked up and grinned, dropping for a moment the coconut he was shredding into a fine, fluffy pile.

Compared to what Abraham was able to do two weeks ago, this was an enormous expenditure of energy. He'd had malaria, maybe typhoid, maybe even something else, leaving him without the energy to lift his head. But both of his parents died last month of Ebola, so when Abraham took sick, no one would go near him.

Except Nyandibo. Before the Ebola crisis, she was a nurse at a government-run hospital about 45 minutes from her West Point home. When Ebola swelled in Monrovia in late July, public and private health facilities closed, and Nyandibo had no clinic to go to.

But her own neighbors were falling sick regularly — not with Ebola, but with malaria, typhoid, and other diseases common in the tropical climate.

Liberia's Ministry of Health says it's still collecting figures on infection and fatalities from the country's most common illnesses, but after multiple requests over several weeks, the ministry could not produce any data on malaria rates since March, when Ebola took hold, and one data analyst told BuzzFeed News that counties haven't reported case numbers for tuberculosis, another common disease, since June because county health officials have been so focused on tracking Ebola.

"We all know that the outbreak affected routine services to the point where health facilities shut down," said Dr. Bernice Dahn, Liberia's chief medical officer and a senior official in the Health Ministry. In August, Monrovia's biggest hospitals closed after doctors in each died from Ebola. Taking a cue from that move, and trying to cope with their own terrified staffs, many public and private clinics shut their doors too. In the midst of Liberia's Ebola crisis, even not having Ebola could kill you.

Dahn says 145 of the 600 clinics in Liberia have been through the first of a two-phase training focused on renewing basic health care. Those clinics are technically open, she said, but "there's a difference between open and functional." Around Monrovia, many open clinics have reduced staff, hours, and services, and there are reports of some charging exorbitant fees. Even the country's top hospital can't cope with basic problems: Last month, the daughter of a member of parliament died from an asthma attack in the parking lot of John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital.