Eager volunteers wrestle blackboards out of the bed of a JRS truck and put them to use. One JRS staffer at this camp was kidnapped and his truck stolen; he was later released unharmed. JRS's determination to "accompany" refugees is not just rhetoric.

"Give me a notebook!"

The voice belongs to Fatu, a seven-year-old Liberian girl in the remote village of Genie Brown, 60 miles north of the capital, Monrovia. Holding a book has been a dream for children like Fatu. We give her and her friends pencils, which are received with much joy.

Fatu has never held a comic book. She has not read a bedtime story. Her dream was to get a notebook and write a few words. We are the first outsiders she and her friends have seen in two years. More than a hundred pairs of excited, young eyes look at us.

Surprisingly, no one asks for food. A village elder asks us whether we could supply a blackboard, since some old people were willing to teach the children for free. Other villagers tell us eagerly that they could build a school from mud and branches; that they can do, but they need chalk and, more important, books.

Two years ago, militias fighting for one of the West African warlords raided this village. For the drugged, illiterate, brutal mercenaries, schools are impediments: burning down schools leaves a whole population of frustrated youngsters, easy recruits then for the loot-seeking wars of Africa.

JRS has deeply involved itself in a process that will educate camp children and also draw back into the classroom older students who may have dropped out.

In Liberia, warlords have recruited 30,000 children by abducting them from villages or camps and getting them hooked on drugs. They would give guns to the boys and encourage them to loot villages; they would turn young girls into sex companions for militia members, amputating the hands of those who resisted--as has happened in Sierra Leone.

Here in Genie Brown, they burned the school and executed the head teacher. Other teachers went into hiding. No one dared to speak of schools for a long time.

And now the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) comes to Genie Brown. We are outsiders who have taken the risk of visiting them. Over a hundred children are looking at us with expectation. Can we have notebooks? Can't we get some textbooks? Such seemingly odd questions were asked repeatedly.

But Liberia is an odd country, one with more guns than books. When the United Nations tried to disarm the Monrovia-based militias in December 2003, it expected 1,000 weapons to be surrendered. But 11,000 members of militia came forward, offering their guns, expecting a guns-for-money deal, and the U.N. had neither the logistics nor the money to handle so many.

The contours of war in Africa are changing. From decolonization struggles to identity conflicts between tribes and races, various factions fight for pieces of this resource-rich continent. Liberia itself is like the blind beggar who went about begging with a golden bowl. The country is rich in gold, oil, and diamonds. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor and his cohorts let loose a violent orgy for nearly fourteen years trying to corner these resources. Other warlords and their militias jumped into the fray, embarking on a spree of death and mayhem.

Liberia is the heart of darkness where ironies abound. It rains almost every day, but water from Lebanon is sold in the supermarkets. Rice is imported from China to this country, which should be Africa's rice bowl. Situated beautifully in the Mano River basin, watered by majestic rivers, Liberia has had no electricity for the last ten years. Illiteracy is at 70 percent, unemployment at 85 percent. The country has just 28 doctors. Malnutrition and starvation dog the population.

Liberia has been the stage for big wars in 1993, 1995, and one that started in 2000. LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy) and MODEL (Movement for Democracy in Liberia) unleashed attacks from western and eastern Liberia. Many have lost everything. As a woman in one camp told us: "In the previous wars, we lost our goods, money. But this war is different. This time we have lost our will to start again." The country is just emerging from this war: 200,000 of the country's 3 million people were killed, nearly a million fled the country, and around 700,000 are eking out a life in crowded camps, including Genie Brown, as internally displaced people (IDPs).

About ten years ago the JRS was working in Gbarnga and Nimba, two counties in this war-ravaged nation. When violence forced people to flee to nearby Ivory Coast and Guinea, JRS accompanied the people there. JRS itself fell victim to militia violence many times--losing cars, being chased by militias--but it stayed faithfully with the displaced people.

When we came back in October 2003 in response to an urgent appeal by the International JRS office, we found a country scorched by hatred. Widespread looting, burning, and displacement made Liberia look like a country hounded by an evil force. Traveling to the districts, we found beautiful mountains scarred by thousands of huts, homes for thousands expelled by militia violence. People have fled marauding mobs of unruly youngsters, who killed without discrimination and abducted other children.

Liberia looked gloomy. The power of evil engulfed this long- suffering nation. There was no electricity, no water, and no telephones. For the majority of Liberians, getting the next meal was an ordeal. In spite of the World Food Programme's efforts, starvation prevailed. What can we bring to a people who have seen only death and destruction?

UN-supplied green tarps cover these huts in just one of dozens of Liberia's camps for IDPs, internally displaced people. In a nation of 3 million, 700,000 struggle under camp conditions.

Good will and nothing else

In the crowded camps, where thousands live in miserable dark huts, we found light. Light in the form of teachers. These men and women, unpaid for years, were silently at work. With no outside support they were trying to run schools in the camps in spite of the militias that attacked and damaged the school buildings. The teachers, undeterred, were teaching in the morning, and in the evenings they were repairing their mud-walled schools in the camps. They had good will and nothing else--no blackboards, no notebooks, no benches, and only water cans for students' chairs.

The JRS staffers who came in 2003 took their inspiration from these teachers and decided to help the educational system by supplying materials and helping repair damaged schools. The example of the volunteering teachers also mobilized the community; parents and students lent a hand in building mud- walled schools.

Camp children have been preyed upon by militias, first damaging or destroying their schools and then forcing young boys to carry guns and young girls to be sex slaves.

As the buildings rose, so did hope. Schooling has a therapeutic effect on a traumatized population; it starts a healing process. After two years of frustration, boys and girls were once again in school. These are not perfect schools, but they are theirs.

Within weeks, 12,500 children started learning again in seven camps. Two hundred and eighty teachers, despite years of misery, made another gallant attempt to do what they do. They did not have proper clothes. Many of those who needed glasses did not have them. They had thrown them away years ago to escape the wrath of militias who considered wearing glasses, even carrying a pen, to be a subversive act.

But the teachers contributed what they had: their teaching skills. JRS, for its part, trucked in blackboards and chalk, helped train other teachers, and drew back in students who had dropped out.

"These people have an incredible resiliency," says Fr. Ken Gavin, SJ, new director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, who visited a number of camps in Liberia as he was getting a feel for the scope of JRS activities worldwide. "They just haven't given up."

Needs abound

The problem of books remains. Militias looted the ministry of education and destroyed book depots. The education minister in Monrovia warned us to come with flashlights when we visited: there was no electricity and the stairwells were dark.

JRS is planning on supplying five notebooks to each of the 12,500 children in these resurrected schools in the camps, even the remote ones. The next effort will be to replace the jerry can seats with benches.

And when the IDP camps are dismantled and the people start their journey back home, JRS hopes to accompany these people, because their needs do not stop. These communities deserve more schools, the teachers deserve more training, and the children deserve books and even soccer balls. JRS is helping to offer these people, a generation brutalized by war, an alternative. Investing in education--in books, buildings, uniforms, supplies, and teachers--is an investment in peace for this long-suffering people and their country.

Fr. Amalraj Chinnappan, a Jesuit from India's Madurai Province, has worked for fourteen years with refugees, including Sri Lankans fleeing to India, and served as the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) regional director for South Asia. He currently directs JRS's efforts in Liberia.

And maybe Liberian children like Fatu will read stories about animals and birds and children in other countries. And maybe they will learn that in most parts of the world children do not need to beg for a notebook, that in most of parts of the world schools are not attacked, children do not flee in fear. Maybe they can be assured that love exists in the world and that the nihilist militias have nothing to offer.

When Liberia takes guns away from its child soldiers, it needs to give them books, a promise of security, and a path toward a bright future.

The Jesuit Refugee Service walks with the thousands of children in Liberia, helping them toward these simple dreams.