The nursing student who saved her father from Ebola in a home-made isolation ward

Doctors were horrified. Fatu Kekula was trying to care for her family, sick with Ebola, at home using nothing more than plastic rubbish bags, a raincoat bought in the market, boots, a surgical mask and gloves.

"Doctors called and told me to leave them right alone and not go anywhere near them," the 22-year-old nursing student said.

"I couldn't. They're my only family."

Liberia has suffered a severe shortage of space at treatment centres, with many people turned away, forced to go home, dying terrible deaths and infecting family members who try to help them.

Kekula's story is testament to the grief and confusion family members feel when urged by authorities and health workers not to touch sick relatives. Most go into denial and treat them anyway, without precautions.

In August, Kekula's father Moses, mother Victoria, sister Vivienne and a young cousin, Alfred Wennie, 14, who had been taken in by the Kekulas as a foster child, all fell desperately ill with Ebola. Every day, Kekula said, she called for an ambulance and begged for help. For more than two weeks, none came.

Kekula was at a relative's home in Grand Bassa County when her father, a 52-year-old administrator at a clinic, fell sick on July 29. A week earlier, he had been diagnosed with typhoid and given a bed that had just been vacated by an Ebola patient in the clinic where he worked.