Boredom On The Border Between Liberia And Guinea

VPM | By John Poole and Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Published December 10, 2014 at 10:06 PM EST

Updated June 14, 2024

The bright yellow steel bridge over St. John's River is an official border crossing between Liberia and Guinea. The Liberian-Guinean border has been closed since July to help curb the spread of Ebola.

A large rusty chain across the bridge, with two padlocks, marks where Liberian territory ends. There's a similar chain on the Guinean side.

The sign to the customs gate has been nearly overgrown with vegetation. Locals on both sides of the borders are now using the deserted areas near the crossing to plant cassavas and chili peppers.

Sylvester Luogon of the Liberian National Police has been assigned to the border crossing for two months as part of a regular police rotation.

The customs house at the Liberian border.

Prince Dolo, 34, used to work as a money-changer at the border. Now there's no work. "The reason why I'm not happy is that I have nothing to do," he says. "No means to live. So I think [when] disease stops killing, hunger kills." Now that Ebola is "subsiding," he says, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf should reopen the border.

A group of now-unemployed men still gathers at the border each day to play cards and hang out.

They’re from the same ethnic group. They speak the same language. And they live on both sides of the Liberia-Guinea divide in the area around Liberia’s eastern border city of Ganta, in Nimba County. The families straddle the border, which is not fenced.

“Right over there is the border,” says businessman Prince Haward, directing our attention to some rubber farms not too far away. “Those are the rubber farms you find in Guinea.”

Many families have relatives who live right across St. John’s River, which separates the two countries, he says. They used to cross back and forth at the busy border post.

Then Ebola came, arriving in Liberia back in March when someone from Guinea entered the country. To curb the further spread of the virus, Liberian officials shut the border in July.

Haward, whose family has lived in the area for nearly a century, calls the government wise for closing the border to help protect Liberia — and Ganta. “Life comes first,” he says, “before economic activities.”

There has definitely been an economic impact. When the border post closed, says Haward, many people lost their jobs.

There’s no activity whatsoever: no cars, no trucks, no commerce. And that means no government revenue and no income.

People are twiddling their fingers. Grasses are growing superhigh. There are absolutely no vehicles, no noise, nobody coming and going — nothing.

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John Poole

John Poole is a senior visuals editor at NPR. He loves working with talented people and teams to create compelling stories that resonate with the 40 million people who visit NPR's digital platforms each month.

Poole has spent over 20 years working at the forefront of digital and visual media. At NPR, he co-produced "Project Song," a video series that won NPR's first-ever Emmy Award. He shared a Peabody Award for team coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2015 as well as a World Press Photo award for "Life After Death," a view of the crisis from the perspective of a remote Liberian town.

Before coming to NPR, he was part of a small team of journalists at The Washington Post that developed a style of short-form, documentary video that received national and international acclaim. His work has been recognized by The National Journal, International Documentary Magazine, The American Film Institute, the National Press Photographers Association, and the White House News Photographers Association.

He holds a B.A. from Vassar College and lives with his family in Washington, DC.

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