For two weeks in September, Harris Wureh, 17, and Mercy Kennedy, 9, tended to their mother as her condition deteriorated. Marie Wureh, a widow who traded goods at the local market, became infected with Ebola while she cared for a woman who had fallen ill.

The siblings, quarantined in their two-room, concrete-block shanty in Monrovia, Liberia, fed their mother food that neighbors left outside and tried to keep her clean. As her suffering increased, Wureh made her son repeat his promise that he would become a computer programmer and would ensure Mercy got an education too.

On October 1, the children and their mother rode in the same ambulance to an Ebola treatment unit in another part of Liberia's capital city. Wureh