afrol News / IRIN, 7 September - Aaron Nyumah spent the last 15 years in a refugee camp in Guinea, but he has returned home to rebuild his country and his life as part of a regional programme to help repatriate war-scattered Liberians.

“With peace now in my country, it is good that we have come back to help rebuild our homes and country destroyed by war,” he said.

During Liberia’s 14-year war most of the country’s three million people were displaced or fled the country. Security is now provided by a 15,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force, which is helping train a new police force and army.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) is operating a voluntary repatriation programme in West Africa to get Liberians home before funding for refugee camps that they live in runs out at the end of the year and food handouts stop.

REPATRIATION

Since UNHCR’s repatriation programme began in November 2004, over 38,000 Liberians have been helped home from Guinea alone. But nearly as many Liberians - over 33,000 - remain in camps along the Guinea-Liberia border.

Across West Africa, some 142,720 Liberians are still living as refugees, primarily in Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Ghana.

UNHCR has launched mass information activities, including sending officials and local leaders who have returned to Liberia on “go and tell” missions to camps across the region to encourage their compatriots to return.

In other cases, UNHCR is sponsoring family members to make “go and see” visits, to check for themselves the security and living arrangements in their hometowns.

The refugees, carrying any belongings they have in colourful bundles, journey home by truck and canoe over the Macona River that marks the frontier between French-speaking Guinea and English-speaking Liberia.

Some 16,000 of 18,000 Liberians living in Kissidougou in Guinea’s southern Forest Region have been helped home in this manner by UNHCR. The remaining 2,000 will temporarily resettle to refugee camps further south along Guinea’s border with Liberia, allowing the 15-year-old camp at Kissidougou to close for good.

And every two weeks UNHCR funds a boat to take more Liberians home from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire by sea.

BACK HOME

Now home in the central Liberian town of Gbarnga, Nyumah looks at the crumbling remains of his home, which he fled in 1990 as Liberia slipped into war. But he’s ready for the rebuilding task ahead, he says, after learning carpentry in the camps.

Other returnees, like Jenneh Kumba, who grew up in the Guinea camps, are determined to turn their experience in a foreign land to their advantage back in Liberia.

“Guinea has proved a real life experience for me - [as I have been] living here since the age of eight. Today I am literate in both French and in English. I am now a secretary and above all I have a daughter,” said Kumba.

The influx of returnees is making a visible difference in towns like Gbarnga, a trading centre that is beginning to bustle again. Everywhere people are rebuilding homes, most with mud and clay for the walls and palm thatch roofs.

Rebuilding homes is an urgent task where, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, over 60 percent of communities in Liberia do not have adequate shelter.

Kemah Kollie, a mother of 10, prefers the hardship of rebuilding at home to life in the camps, “At least here we are living with dignity,” she said.

© afrol News / IRIN

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