January 19, 2006
by Toya Richards Hill

BREWERVILLE, LIBERIA – Running in fear has been a way of life for Liberians for 14 years.

Practically any citizen who survived the civil war that raged here between 1989 and 2003 can tell you a story about taking flight to the thunderous sound of rebel mortars just down the road. Or about being so dehumanized by marauding fighters that they had no choice but to run.

So the story told by Fatu B. Barrie, a 43-year-old mother of five girls, is a familiar one. When she was nine months pregnant, a rebel soldier claiming to be a rescuer tried to extract money from her. When she resisted, he became violent.

"I said, ‘No,'" Barrie recalls. "So he took the knife and put it right on my chest."

One of Barrie's friends lent her money to pay off the man; and that was enough to save her life and that of her unborn child. There would be no real rescue for Barrie that day – only terror.

That, she says, is when "I decided to leave."

Barrie fled to a nearby hospital, where others also were taking refuge. But even there no one was safe – especially the women.

"At night, while you were sleeping, they tried to take down your panties and have you," she says quietly. "The whole compound became afraid."

So, like Harriet Tubman, the legendary woman who led thousands of slaves to freedom in the United States, Barrie became a leader of about 300 women and children who decided to leave the hospital compound.

In the bush and on back roads, Barrie and her band traveled on foot for most of a week, picking up more women and children along the way. They headed for an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp operated by the Concerned Christian Community (CCC), a Liberian-based humanitarian organization established in 1990.

CCC receives some of its funding from the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA), an arm of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). From 2001 through 2004, PDA provided financial support specifically for women and families in the camps; in 2005 it shifted its focus away from the camps and toward re-establishing local communities, according to the chair of the CCC board, the Rev. Kortu K. Brown.

An IDP camp – essentially an open field littered with hundreds of crude shanties made of mud, sticks, tin and flotsam – was a haven Barrie had sought out before, for brief stints when the fighting got too close and too rough. But she had always returned home. This time she meant to stay.

By the time her group reached the camp, in January 2002, she says, "The women that entered here were more than one thousand."

Tales of trauma

Camps much like the one Barrie found have enveloped thousands and thousands of Liberians too afraid to go home because of the fighting. They were located wherever the families in flight decided to stop – sometimes near a main road, sometimes far off the beaten path.

Brown says most of the camps sprang up in 1992, and many have shut down and reopened as fighting has ebbed and flowed. In 1993 there were 13 IDP camps in Brewerville alone.

Once a camp took hold, local organizations like CCC and Church World Service swooped in to provide essential services – from latrines to medical care to one-on-one psychosocial counseling.

"We made them understand that we were there to give them assistance" and that "they should not feel that they were the only ones displaced," says Jatu M. Wilson, a children's desk officer for CCC.

Getting the uprooted to trust counselors took time, Wilson says. Getting deep into their trauma and pain often took even longer – "Months, sometimes."

When a breakthrough came, sometimes a client would cry, and "sometimes we would join in, because it's not easy," Wilson says.

Last fall, Liberia's transitional government declared the camps closed and told residents to return to their homes. Meanwhile, the country held a presidential election, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first female head of state in Africa. She was inaugurated as Liberia's 23rd president on Jan. 16 and will serve for six years.

Many internally displaced Liberians complied with the government's instructions and left the camps, but many stayed, and are still there today. Some say they don't have money for a journey home; some say there isn't anything to go home to; some say they'll need help to rebuild. When the closure was announced, various United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups provided resettlement money for some camp residents.

Many Liberian communities are still without safe drinking water and other necessities, says Barrie, who got eight months of sanitation training while living in the IDP camp. "Every one of us cannot go (from the camps) at once."

Barrie says she purposely waited until Johnson Sirleaf was officially in power before she felt secure enough to go home. But she believes now that the peace is real.

"I believe it totally," she says. "Liberia today is not like before."

Presbyterian News Service