The comfort of a rusting roof

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By Elizabeth Blunt BBC News, Liberia

The Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is continuing with her attempt to steer the country back towards stability after years of war. And while some parts of the capital Monrovia now seem to be getting back to normal, in other parts just having a roof on your house is a major struggle.

Reverend Thomson Yengbe greets guests in the temporary village hall

The little houses in the villages along the road to Lofa County are neat and new, and - to an outside eye - the epitome of picturesque Africa.

The mud huts have palm thatched roofs and walls freshly smoothed with ochre yellow clay.

Some have even been decorated with hand prints and other patterns in those most ancient of pigments - white and black and terracotta red.

But the people who live there are not particularly proud of their new homes.

The destruction in many places was almost total

Whenever I talked to them they were eager to tell me that they did not always live like this, and they were keen to show me the foundations of their old houses, spacious and solidly built with corrugated iron roofs.

Lofa County, in the far north, on the borders of Guinea and Sierra Leone, for a long time escaped the worst of Liberia's civil war. But in the most recent - and everyone hopes final - phase of the war, after the year 2000, rebel forces invaded from over the Guinea border and fought their way south to unseat President Charles Taylor.

Lofa County found itself right in the front line. The destruction in many places was almost total.

No warning

Nyewolihun is a modest, out-of-the-way village in Kolahun district. We found it an hour and a half's walk down a rough track from Kolahun town. For 10 years and more the war passed this place by.

Lofa County found itself in the front line of the final phase of the war

But in 2001 government soldiers attacked the village without warning, from across the stream which marks the edge of the settlement, and burned it to the ground. They did not stop to explain why, but they may have suspected the villagers of sympathising with the rebels.

The people scattered in all directions. When they returned they found the bodies of 16 of their neighbours lying among the smouldering ruins of their homes. After that everyone left and went to Sierra Leone or Guinea as refugees.

In 2004 when their area was quiet they started coming home. The first to return had to rely on tree crops like bananas for food, and on hunting the game which had become plentiful in the abandoned forest.

'Some kind of a house'

But this is a fertile area and Nyewolihun is growing all its own food once again. When we visited they served us home grown rice, with short nutty grains, fish from the stream and fresh cloudy palm wine. They hope to have their cocoa trees, their main cash crop, back in full production by next year.

There are still gaps in the fabric of the village, the rubble of houses whose owners still have not come home, but most families have rebuilt some kind of a house, and there is a small mud and thatch school for the children.

On the square foundation of the old meeting hall, a temporary marquee of green palm branches can be raised for special occasions.

Pepper soup

The towns, if anything, are in a worse state than the countryside. While people are busily rebuilding their own houses, the old Lebanese-owned stores that used to line the main street of Kolahun town are still in ruins.

The local people in Lofa seemed quietly confident that peace would hold And among the ruins people are squatting, in tarpaulin and plywood shacks. Petty traders sit at rickety little stalls along the roadside.

The best restaurant in town is a kind of wooden box built into the corner of one of the ruins, although it still manages flowered plastic table cloths, white net curtains over the doorways and a choice of main course - bean stew or pepper soup.

The village was burnt to the ground by government soldiers in 2001

The Lebanese traders who used to have a stranglehold on Liberian commerce were often resented, but now the local authorities upcountry are begging them to come back. Despite all the rebuilding going on, no-one is selling building materials in the whole of Lofa County.

Cement, roofing sheets, ceiling panels - all have to be bought in Monrovia, the capital, a long day's journey away on unpaved roads, and hauled back up at considerable expense.

New confidence

When I suggested to the owner of one store in Monrovia, close to the truck stop where lorries leave for the north, that he was missing a great commercial opportunity in places like Lofa, his verdict was that the situation was still far too dangerous to risk opening up again in the interior.

And yet the local people in Lofa seemed quietly confident that peace would hold. While I was there I got embroiled in a debate about roofing sheets, the merits of various gauges and qualities and how long they would last.

Could you manage with a thinner gauge as long as you were away from the corrosive effect of sea air? Would it have to be painted every year with anti-rust paint?

The verdict was it would certainly last five years, perhaps 10. No-one even questioned whether it was worth spending the money, when someone might come and burn the village at gunpoint or carry off the roofing sheets.

And that is a true sense of security - knowing that the roof will stay on your house until it finally rusts away.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 12 May, 2007 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.