Monrovias Tomb Dwellers

• Photographer
  Hannah Maule-ffinch, United Kingdom

Liberia was high on the news agenda as the worst-hit country in
the Ebola outbreak. But Ebola was low on the list of concerns of
the young adults and children who live in the capital city’s main
cemetery. Poverty and the fall-out of war led them to remove
human remains from the graves where they now live in squalid
conditions.

The pictures and interviews show the utterly horrendous situations
of this community, – the youngest was 13 and pregnant, many
have been living there since they were ten-years-old. Several of
the men are former child soldiers. The majority of women survive
through prostitution, the men through crime. They are all drug
addicts.

People have lived in the cemetery since Liberia’s bloody civil war.
Instead of offering them support, Liberia’s government tackled the
problem by building a high wall around the cemetery.