The New York Times ran a story about Ebola a few days ago. It begins by introducing you to Kaizer Dour, who died recently of the disease.

Ebola is a family disease, Liberians are reminded continually in Sunday sermons. The more families pull together to fight the virus, the more they seem to fall apart.
Kaizer’s extensive family had survived Liberia’s 14-year civil war, growing stronger as it united against poverty, rapacious rulers and indifferent governments. So when Kaizer got sick, his mother, Mamie Doryen, did what the Doryens had always done, turning to her family to help with her ailing son.
Kaizer, infected by his father, soon passed the virus to two aunts. In all, seven members from three generations died in quick succession. His mother, the family’s dominant figure, survived. But blamed for the calamity, she went into hiding, a pariah in her family’s hour of greatest need. The family’s center could not hold.
“Ebola was like a bomb,” one of Kaizer’s uncles said.

(Bold mine.)

You can find the whole story here. It is heartbreaking. It shakes faith.

I wrote a reflection on the subject last week.

“The situation is catastrophic. There are several villages and communities that have been basically wiped out. In one of the villages I went to, there were 40 inhabitants and 39 died,” said an official with Doctors Without Borders recently after visiting Sierra Leone, one of three West African countries devastated by Ebola. Anthony Fallah Borwah, a Liberian bishop, told a reporter, “We are losing our humanity in the face of Ebola,” which makes “impossible ordinary human kindnesses, such as putting your arm around someone who is crying.”
There is “a feeling,” the bishop said, “that God has forsaken us.”
It’s hard to look at West Africa and not wonder whether he’s right.

You can find the rest here.

— Michael R. Strain is a resident scholar and economist at the American Enterprise Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.