Sheilia Passewe, Tonny Onyulo and Jabeen Bhatti

Special for USA TODAY

MONROVIA, Liberia — Emily Abaleo, 38, sits on a narrow bench, squashed between her snoring son and two younger daughters who pass the time by elbowing one another in this city's West Point slum. She recalls better times there, before a deadly virus hit, before a quarantine to stop it and before it killed her husband.

B.E., or Before Ebola, was a time just a few short months ago before everything changed and life here in the slum became even harder.

"It has been difficult to feed these children as a single parent," she says. "Life is so unbearable when you are under quarantine."

Abaleo's husband died of Ebola in early August when the disease swept the slum that sits on a peninsula on the western edge of this capital city. In response, the government sealed off the district with barbed wire in an attempt to enforce a strict quarantine and a dawn-to-dusk curfew to curb growing unrest against it.

As a result, thousands of people — estimates put the population of West Point at 75,000 — are chafing under the restrictions as Ebola continues to spread like wildfire in the cramped conditions of the township. The hardest hit of three West African countries that mark the epicenter of the virus' deadly spread, Liberia has lost 2,413 to the virus, nearly half of the 5,000 killed by Ebola, mainly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

At the same time, another 2,000 Liberians have been infected since the outbreak started in spring. West Point is not ground zero — that would be Lofa County in the north — but it's close.

Liberia may be witnessing a slowing in the spread of the virus, World Health Organization officials said last week, cautioning that it would be false to say the outbreak is under control.

"We're seeing a reversal of that rapid rate of increase to the point that there seems to be a decline right now," WHO Assistant Director General Bruce Aylward told reporters. "But that would be like saying your pet tiger is under your control."

Still, the dire scene in West Point is making the situation worse. Besides spreading Ebola, some have escaped the quarantine in a desperate attempt to survive, bringing the virus with them to other parts of the city.

Others like Abaleo — who has so far tested negative for Ebola — make do, staying stuck in the slum and fretting about the children.

In West Point, people live close together in wooden and corrugated metal shacks, often sleeping dozens to a room, on blankets on a mud floor, under a tin roof, which pounds mercilessly when it rains.

Most don't have toilets — there are four communal ones in the entire slum — and no running water. Cooking is often done at designated points in the city-within-a-city. In normal districts, the scent of trees and exhaust mark the streets. Here, the perfume is smoke from wood fires, fried fish, excrement and garbage.

"There's also a higher risk of contagion for any infectious disease in a setting that is so crowded and lacks running water and proper sanitation," Abaleo points out.

People here live hand-to-mouth and on the edge: Three-quarters of most people's income is spent on food, aid workers say. Those without income — unemployment runs high here — live off rations and donations, which have become scarcer since the quarantine began.

Despite all that, it was a tight community until now, one where residents were supportive of each other, with informal social and economic networks that ensured survival. Many in such slums don't want to leave their home district because of that support, but those ties are breaking down.

"When you take your fish to the market (in the slum), people will not buy because they say you have Ebola and you will infect them," said Christina Tardy, 28, who sells fish, one of the seaside slum's main business activities. "This has made life even harder because there's no source of income."

She lines up for charity handouts of maize and rice in order to help feed children who have been abandoned as a result of the outbreak. Smiling politely while carrying one of the orphans, she says the slum has been forgotten.

"This place is like an island — it's not really part of Liberia at all," she said. "The state does nothing here. It provides no water, no schools, no sanitation, no roads and no hospitals. Residents rely on donors who rarely come around anymore."

Coming out of a brutal 14-year civil war only in 2003, the country does not have enough resources to fight the disease, especially in the slum, health officials say.

But many, including James Jallah, deputy manager of the National Ebola Taskforce, maintain that quarantining of slum communities, as well as the restrictions on the movement of people — especially in hard-hit rural Lofa County — has helped reduce the infection rate of the Ebola virus throughout the country.

"People should continue with the measures outlined in this fight," Jallah said. "These restrictions have helped the government to reduce infection tremendously."

However, given WHO's caution over the decline in cases here and the lack of accurate tracking of Ebola in slums, there are no figures that bear this out. Health workers and community activists say conditions in the slum are spreading the virus.

"We're living in dehumanizing conditions and we also pose grave danger (to ourselves and others) during this prevailing Ebola crisis," said Richard Kieh, a community activist in West Point.

Samson Doelue, a health worker, said the government should move quickly to decongest slum communities and relocate people from overcrowded districts as the virus is spread by bodily contact — sometimes with the dead, which can take days to be removed from West Point.

"The government should tackle overcrowdings in slums and put up medical facilities if they need to win the fight against Ebola and any related diseases," he said. "People from slums are also ailing and dying from other diseases due to lack of medical facilities to cater for them."

In Abaleo's case, her husband was removed to a quarantine center elsewhere in the city to be isolated and treated. But she wasn't allowed to leave the slum to see him before he died.

These days, she is waiting for better times, waiting for help, waiting for the day things go back to normal, or as normal as they can be — A.E., After Ebola.

Until then, she says, she'll figure something out.

"I am now thinking about how I can raise these children," she says.

Onyulo reported from Kenya and Bhatti from Berlin