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.

His wife sent her four youngest foster children away and did her best to care for him, but when he weakened dramatically, with vomiting and diarrhea, she called Kekula home.

Kekula and her sister Vivienne took Moses to Monrovia, the capital, by taxi, but no Ebola treatment unit could take him. On the ride back, Kekula made a plan.

She set up a makeshift isolation centre in an unfinished room outside the house. She bought raincoats, rain boots, chlorine and other supplies. Then she went to work.

When she entered her father's treatment room she put on socks, plastic bags donned like waders, rain boots, four sets of gloves, a coat, a mask and a plastic bag over her hair. She put in an intravenous drip. She poured liquids down his throat, drop by drop.

She gave him blood pressure medicine, antibiotics and analgesics for his fever and headache.

She even gave him an antiretroviral medicine normally used to save the lives of Aids patients.

A week later, just as he was beginning to show signs of improvement, his wife became sick. Then the disease struck Vivienne and Alfred, the cousin, who'd been sent to live with them by his father, a farmer.

On the 18th day, as Alfred's condition quickly declined, an ambulance arrived. Kekula watched it depart with her family members for Monrovia, fear gripping her heart.

She prayed that their Ebola tests would be negative. All turned out positive.

Outside John F. Kennedy Medical Centre, Alfred collapsed, convulsing. He died but the others survived.