By Zadie Smith

Liberia is a country mired in its past. But, as Zadie Smith discovers when she meets its traumatised boy soldiers, struggling rubber workers and children desperate to learn, it is taking its first tentative steps to a better future. In the second part of the Observer and Oxfam's 'Words in Action' initiative, the prize-winning writer finds hope amongst the heartbreak

Monday

There are no direct flights from England to Liberia. Either you go to Brussels or you book with Astraeus, a specialist airline named after a Roman goddess of justice. They run a service to Freetown, in neighbouring Sierra Leone. The clientele is mostly Africans dressed as if for church. Formal hats, zirconiums and Louis Vuitton holdalls are popular. A toddler waddles down the aisle in a three-piece suit and bow tie. Only non-Africans are dressed for 'Africa', in khakis, sandals, wrinkled T-shirts. Their bags are ostentatiously simple: frayed rucksacks, battered cases. The luggage of a nomad people.

A cross-section of travellers sits in a row. A glamorous African girl in a silky blouse. An English nun. An American aid worker. A Lebanese man, who describes himself as a 'fixer': 'I fix things in Freetown - electrical systems, buildings.' He calls the well-dressed Africans Soon-Comes. 'They come, they soon go. Their families assume they're rich - they try to live up to this idea.' The plane descends over Sierra Leone. The fixer looks out the window and murmurs 'white man's graveyard' in the same spirit that people feel compelled to say 'the Big Apple' as their plane approaches JFK. This, like much else on the plane, accommodates the Africa of imagination.

In Sierra Leone everyone 'deplanes', taking the Africa of imagination with them, a story that has at least a familiar form. Who remains in the story of Liberia? Barely a dozen people, ushered to the front to stare at each other across the wide aisles of business class. The nun is travelling on: Sister Anne of the Corpus Christi Carmelites. Brown socks in brown sandals, brown wimple; a long, kindly face mapped with wrinkles. She has worked in Liberia since the Eighties, running a mission school in Greenville. 'We left when the war became impossible - we're back now, teaching students. It's not easy. Our students have seen such terrible things. Beyond imagination, really.' She looks troubled when asked to describe the Liberian character. 'They are either very, very good people - or the opposite. It is hard to be good in these conditions.'

Flying low over Monrovia there are no lights visible, only flood rain and sheet lightning illuminating the branches of palm trees, the jungle in a bad movie. The airport is no bigger than a village school. The one-ring baggage carousel is open to the elements; through the aperture the lightning flashes. There are more baggage handlers than passengers. They mill without occupation, profoundly bored, soaking wet. It seems incredible that heat like this persists through rain. The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke hoarding, ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context. This one says: 'Coke - Make it real.' Just after the Coke sign there is a contrary sign, an indication that irony is not a currency in Liberia. It is worn by a girl who leans against the exit in a T-shirt that says: The Truth Must Be Told.

The truth about Liberia is disputed. It consists of simultaneously asserted, mutually exclusive 'facts'. The CIA World Factbook states that in 1980 a military coup led by Samuel Doe ushered in a decade of authoritarian rule, but not - as is widely believed in Liberia - that the CIA itself funded both the coup and the regime. Doe's successor, Charles Taylor, instigator of the 1989-97 Liberian Civil War in which an estimated 300,000 people died, is presently in The Hague awaiting trial for crimes against humanity, yet there are supportive hand-painted billboards across Monrovia (CHARLES TAYLOR IS INNOCENT!) and hagiographic collections of his speeches for sale in the airport. In Europe and America, the Liberian civil war is described as a 'tribal conflict'. In Liberian classrooms children from half a dozen different tribes sit together and do not seem to know what you mean when you ask if this causes a difficulty.

There is no real road network in Liberia. Dur ing the late-summer rainy season much of the country is inaccessible. Tonight the torrential rain is unseasonable (it is March), but the road is the best in the country, properly surfaced: one long straight line from the airport to the Mamba Point Hotel in Monrovia. Lysbeth Holdoway, Oxfam's press officer, sits in the back of an all-weather 4x4 outlining Liberia's present situation. She has long chestnut hair and is in youthful middle age. Four or five times a year she visits some of the more benighted countries of the world. Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. 'Three-quarters of the population lives below the poverty line - that's US$1 a day; half are on less than 50 cents a day. What infrastructure there was has been destroyed - roads, ports, municipal electricity, water, sanitation, schools, hospitals - all desperately lacking or nonexistent; 86 per cent unemployment, no street lights...' Through the car window, dead street lamps can be seen - they were stripped of their components during the war. Lightning continues to reveal the scene: small huts made of mud bricks, sheets of corrugated iron and refuse; more bored young men, sitting in groups, dully watching the cars go by. The cars are of two types: huge Toyota Land Cruisers like this one, usually with UN stamped on their bonnets, or else dilapidated Nissans, the back windows of which reveal six people squeezed into the back seats, four in the front. Our driver, John Flomo, is asked whether the essentials - a water and sanitation system, electricity, schools - existed prior to the war. 'Some, yes. In towns. Less in the country.' Even the electricity that lights the airport is not municipal. It comes from a hydro plant belonging to Firestone, the American rubber com pany, famous for its tyres. Firestone purchased 1m acres of this country in 1926, a 99-year lease at the bargain rate of six cents an acre. They use their hydro plant to power their operation. The airport electricity is a 'gift' to the nation, although Firestone's business could not function without an airport. 'All this is Firestone,' says Flomo, pointing at the darkness.

Tuesday

The Mamba Point Hotel is an unusual Liberian building. It is air-conditioned, with toilets and clean drinking water. In the parking lot a dozen UN trucks are parked. In the breakfast room the guests are uniform: button-down collars, light khakis, MacBooks. Their conversations demonstrate college-town levels of self-reflexivity. The only subject in Liberia is Liberia itself. 'Here's the crazy thing,' one man tells another over croissants. 'Malaria isn't even a hard problem to solve.' At a corner table, an older woman reels off blunt statistics to a newcomer who notes them down: 'Population, 3.5m. Over 100,000 with HIV; male life expectancy, 38; female, 42. Sixty-five Liberian dollars to one US dollar. Officially literacy is 57 per cent but that figure is really pre-war - there's this whole missing generation...' In the corner bar, a dozen male Liberian waiters rest against the counter, devotedly following Baywatch.

All trips by foreigners, however brief, are done in the NGO Land Cruisers. The two-minute journey to Oxfam headquarters passes an open rubbish dump through which people scavenge, alongside skinny pigs. The NGO buildings are lined up on 'UN Drive'. Each has a thick boundary wall stamped with its own logo. Liberian security defends their gates. The American embassy goes further, annexing an entire street. Oxfam shares its compound with Unicef. These offices resemble an English sixth-form college, a white concrete block with swing doors and stone stairwells. On each door there is a sticker: NO FIREARMS. Here Phil Samways, the country programme manager, heads a small development team. He is 54, sandy-haired, lanky, wearing the short-sleeved white shirt English accountants favour in the summer months. Unusually, his is not a development background: for 20 years he worked at Anglian Water. He has an unsentimental, practical manner, speaking precisely and quickly: 'We are moving out of the humanitarian disaster stage now - water and sanitation and so on. Now we're interested in long-term development. We choose schemes that concentrate on education and livelihoods, and the rehabilitation of ex-combatants, of which there are thousands, many of them children. We hope you'll talk to some of them. You'll see a few of our school projects while you're here, and our rural projects in Bong County, and West Point, which is really our flagship project. West Point is a slum - half the population of Monrovia lives in slums. And as you've seen, we have extreme weather - for eight months it rains like this and the country turns into a quagmire. Cholera is a massive problem. But you have to choose the area you'll concentrate on, and we've chosen education. When we asked people what they needed most, they often said education first, over toilets, basic sanitation. Which should tell you something.'

The atmosphere in the hallways is jovial and enthusiastic, like a school newspaper. The staff are mostly young Liberians, educated in the early Eighties before the school system collapsed, or schooled elsewhere in Africa. They are positive about the future, with much optimism focused upon Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the Harvard-educated economist and first female head of state in Africa. Johnson-Sirleaf won the presidency in 2005, narrowly defeating the Liberian footballer George Weah. At present she is in Canada, encouraging foreign investment in her country. After that she is to meet the Japanese. Liberia's expectations are on hold until her return. 'We hope and pray,' people say, when her name comes up. For the moment her impact is conceptual rather than actual: Liberia is having its female moment. Everywhere the talk is of a new generation of girls who will 'take Liberia into the future'. The popular phrase among the NGO-ers is 'gender strategy'. The first visit of the day is to one of the 'Girls Clubs' Oxfam funds.

Abraham Paye Conneh, a 37-year-old Liberian who looks 15 years younger, will accompany the visitors. He speaks a flamboyant, expressive English, peppered with the acronym-heavy language of NGOs. Prior to becoming Oxfam's education project officer, he held down three jobs simultaneously: lecturer at the University of Zion, teacher at the Liberia Baptist Theological Seminary and director of education at the West African Training Institute, a feat that netted him US$10 a day. He is the team's 'character'. He writes poetry. He is evangelical about Oxfam's work: 'It's time for the women! We're understanding gender now in Liberia. We never educated our Liberian women before, we did not see their glorious potential! But we want the women of Liberia to rise up now! Oh yes! Like Ellen rose up! We're saying: anything a man can do, a woman can do in the same superior fashion!'

Phil Samways, who enjoys Abraham's impromptu speeches but does not tend to encourage them, returns to practicalities. 'Now, security is still an issue. There's a midnight curfew for everybody here. We get the odd riot - small spontaneous riots. But you'll be fine with Abraham - you might even get a poem if you're lucky.'

To Lysbeth and Abraham we now add the photographer Aubrey Wade, a 31-year-old Anglo-Dutchman. He is thin, dark blond. He wears a floppy sun hat beneath which a pert nose white with sunblock peeks. He rests his lens on the car window. Hand-painted billboards line the road. HAVE YOU BEEN RAPED? Also STOP RAPE IN LIBERIA. Lysbeth asks Abraham what other particular problems women in Liberia face. The list is long: female circumcision, marriage from the age of 11, polygamy, spousal ownership. Girls have 'traditionally been discouraged from school'. In some tribes, husbands covertly push their wives into sexual affairs so they may charge the offending man an 'infidelity tax', paid in the form of unwaged labour. Indigenous laws like these are practised alongside those shakily enshrined in Liberia's US-based constitution.

A culture of sexual favours predates the war. Further billboards warn girls not to offer their bodies in return for school grades, a common practice. The moral of Liberia might be: where there is weakness, exploit it. This moral is not especially Liberian in character. In May 2006 a BBC investigation uncovered 'systematic sexual abuse' in Liberia: UN peacekeepers offering food to teenage refugees in return for sex. In November 2006 a local anonymous NGO worker in Liberia told the corporation: 'Peacekeepers are still taking advantage of the situation to sexually exploit young girls. The acts are still rampant despite pronouncements that they have been curbed.'

In a school in Unification Town, 14 girls from the Girls Club are picked to sit with us in the new school 'library'. It is a small room, very hot. Lysbeth's cheeks bloom red, her hair sticks to her forehead. Our shirts are see-through with sweat. The small, random collection of textbooks on the shelves are a decade out of date. Next door is the typewriting pool, pride of the club. Here they learn to type on 10 old-fashioned typewriters. It is not a 'school' as that word is commonly understood. It is a building with 1,000 children in it, waiting for a school to manifest itself. The pre-planned questions - Do you enjoy studying? What's your favourite subject? - are rendered absurd. They answer quietly and sadly in a 'Liberian English' that is difficult to understand. The teacher translates unclear answers. She is equally hard to understand.

What would you like to be when you grow up? 'Pilot' is a popular answer. Also 'a sailor in the navy'. By sea, or by air, flight is on their minds. The remainder say 'nurse' or 'doctor' or 'in government'. The two escape routes visible in Liberia: aid and government. What do your fathers do? They are dead, or else they are rubber tappers. A girl sighs heavily. These are not the right questions. The exasperated teacher prompts: 'Ask them how often they are able to come to school.' Despair invades the room. A girl lays her head on the desk. No one speaks.

'Ask me.' It is the girl that sighed. She is 14, her name is Evelyn B Momoh, she has a heart-shaped face, doll features. She practically vibrates with intelligence and impatience. 'We have to work with our mothers in the market. We need to live and there's no money. It's very hard to stay in school. There's no money, do you understand? There's no money at all.' We write this down. Is the typing pool useful? Evelyn squints. 'Yes, yes, of course - it's a good thing, we are very thankful.' There is the sense that she is trying hard not to scream.

This is in contrast to the other girls, who only seem exhausted. And the books? Evelyn answers again. 'I've read all of them now. I'm very good at math. I've read all the math books. We need more.' Are there books in your house? Evelyn blinks slowly, gives up. We file out to the typing room. Aubrey takes pictures of Evelyn as she pretends to type. She submits to this as a politician might to a humiliating, necessary photo op. We file outside into the dry, maddening heat. Aubrey walks the perimeter looking for something to photograph. The school sits isolated on a dusty clearing bordered by monotonous rubber plantations. Evelyn and her girls arrange themselves under a tree to sing a close harmony song, typical, in its melody, of West Africa. 'Fellow Liberians, the war is over! Tell your girls, fetch them to get them to school! Your war is over - they need education!'

The voices are magnificent. The girls sing without facial affect; dead-eyed, unsmiling. Around us the bored schoolboys skulk. Nobody speaks to them or takes their picture. The teacher does not worry that boredom and disaffection may turn to resentment and violence. 'Oh, no, they are very happy for the girls.' As the visitors prepare to leave, Evelyn stops us at the steps. It is a strange look she has, so wilful, so much in want, and yet so completely without expectation. The word 'desperate' is often misused. This is what it means. 'You will write the things we need. You have a pencil?' The list is as follows: books, math books, history books, science books, exercise books, copy books, pens, pencils, more desks, a computer, electricity, a generator for electricity, teachers.

Driving back towards Monrovia: 'Abraham - isn't there a government education budget?'

'Oh yes! Sure. Ms Sirleaf has promised immediate action on essential services. But she has only a US$120m budget for the whole year. The UN budget alone in Liberia for one year is US$875m. And we have a US$3.7bn debt!'

'But how much did what we just saw cost?'

'Ten thousand. We built an extra section of the school and provided all the materials, etcetera. If it had not been done by us or another NGO, it would not be done at all.'

'Do you pay teachers?'

'We are not meant to - we don't want a two-tier system. But we can train them, for example. Many of the teachers in Liberia have only been educated up to the age of 12 or 13 themselves! We have the blind leading the blind!'

'But then you're acting like a government - you're doing their job. Is that what NGOs do?'

'[sigh] Look, there's no human resources, and there's no money. We all must fill in the gap: the UN, Oxfam, Unicef, CCF, the NRC, the RC, Medecins Sans Frontieres, STC, PWJ...'

'?'

'Peace Wind Japan. Another NGO. I can make you a long list. But different aid has different obligations attached. With us, there are no obligations. The money goes directly.'

'So people can send money to you earmarked for a particular project?'

'Oh yes! [extended laughter] Please put that in your article.'

Wednesday

The street scene in Monrovia is post-apocalyptic: people occupy the shell of a previous existence. The InterContinental Hotel is a slum, home to hundreds. The old executive mansion is broken open like a child's playhouse; young men sit on the skeletal spiral staircase, taking advantage of the shade. Abraham points out Liberia's state seal on the wall: a ship at anchor with the inscription The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here. In 1822 freed American slaves (known as Americo-Liberians or, colloquially, Congos) founded the colony at the instigation of the American Colonization Society, a coalition of slave owners and politicians whose motives are not hard to tease out.

Even Liberia's roots are sunk in bad faith. Of the first wave of emigrants, half died of yellow fever. By the end of the 1820s a small colony of 3,000 souls survived. In Liberia they built a facsimile life: plantation-style homes, white-spired churches. Hostile local Malinke tribes resented their arrival and expansion; sporadic armed battle was common. When the ACS went bankrupt in the 1840s, they demanded the 'Country of Liberia' declare its independence. It was the first of many category errors: Liberia was not yet a country. Their agricultural exports were soon dwarfed by the price of imports. A pattern of European loans (and defaulting on same) began in the 1870s. The money was used to partially modernise the black Americo-Liberian hinterlands while ignoring the impoverished indigenous interior. The relationship between the two communities is a lesson in the factitiousness of 'race'. To the Americo-Liberians, these were 'natives' - they continued an illicit slave trade in Malinke people until the 1850s. As late as 1931, the League of Nations uncovered the use of forced indigenous labour.

Abraham, in the front seat, bends his head round to Lysbeth in the back: 'You know what we say to that seal? The Love of Liberty MET us here.' This is a popular Liberian joke. He laughs immoderately. 'So that's how it was. They came here and always kept the power away from us! They had their True Whig Party and for 133 years we were a peaceful one-party state. But there was no justice. The indigenous are 95 per cent of this country, but we had nothing. Oh, those Congos - they had every little bit of power. Everyone in the government was Congo. They did each other favours, gave each other money. We were not even allowed the vote until the Sixties!'

Lys asks a reasonable question: 'But how would one know someone was a Congo?'

'Oh, you would know. They had a way of speaking, a way of dressing. They always called each other Mister. Always the Big Man. And they lived very well. This,' he says, waving at the devastation of Monrovia, 'was all very nice.'

The largest concrete structures - the old ministry of health, the old ministry of defence, the True Whig Party headquarters - are remnants of the peaceful, unjust regimes of President Tubman (1944-71) and President Tolbert (1971-80), for whom Liberians feel a perverse nostalgia. The university, the hospital, the schools, these were financed by a True Whig policy of massive international loans and deregulated foreign-business concessions, typically given to agriculturally 'extractive' companies which ship resources directly out of the country without committing their companies to any value-added processing. For much of the 20th century Liberia had a nickname: Firestone Republic. The deals which condemned Liberians to poverty wages and inhumane living conditions were made in these old government buildings. The people who benefited most from these deals worked in these buildings. Now these buildings have rags hanging from their windows, bullet holes in their facades, and thousands of squatters inside, without toilets, without running water. Naturally, new buildings are built, new deals are made. On 28 January 2005, while an interim 'caretaker' government presided briefly over a ruined country (the elections were due later that year), Firestone rushed through a new concession: 50 cents an acre for the next 37 years.

A processing plant - for which Liberians have been asking since the Seventies - was not part of this deal. Ministers of finance and agriculture, who had no mandate from the people, who would be out of office in a few months, negotiated the deal. It was signed in the cabinet room at the Executive Mansion in the presence of John Blaney, US ambassador at the time. During the same period, Mittal Steel acquired the country's iron ore, giving the company virtual control of the vast Nimba concession area. The campaigning group Global Witness described the Mittal deal as a 'case study in which multinational corporations seek to maximise profit by using an international regulatory void to gain concessions and contracts which strongly favour the corporation over the host nation'.

It is a frustration for activists that Liberians have tended not to trace their trouble back to extractive foreign companies or their government lobbies. Liberians don't think that way. Most Liberians know how much a rubber tapper gets paid: US$35 a month. Everyone knows how much a government minister is paid: US$2,000 a month - a Liberian fortune. No one can tell you Firestone's annual profit (in 2005, from its Liberia production alone: US$81,242,190). In a country without a middle or working class, without a functioning civic life, government is all. It is all there is of money, of housing, of healthcare and schooling, of normal life. It is the focus of all aspirations, all fury. One of the more reliable signs of weak democracy is the synonymity of the word 'government' with government buildings. Storming Downing Street and killing the prime minister would not transfer executive power. In Liberia, as in Haiti, the opposite is true. The violence of the past quarter-century has in part represented a battle over Congo real estate, in particular the second, infamous 'Executive Mansion'. It is hard to find any Liberian entirely free of the mystique of this building. In the book Liberia: The Heart of Darkness , a gruesome account of the 1989-97 war, the author Gabriel Williams's descriptions of 1990's catastrophic battle for Monrovia are half war report, half property magazine: 'From the university campus [Charles Taylor's] NPFL pounded the heavily fortified Executive Mansion: the huge magnificent structure built in 1964 by the Israelis at the cost of US$20m. With its back to the brilliant white beach of the Atlantic, the Executive Mansion is located at the point where West Africa comes closest to Brazil.'

In 1990, that was President Charles Doe inside, refusing to leave. Ten years earlier, when the 28-year-old Doe, a Krahn tribesman and master sergeant in the Liberian army, staged his coup d'etat, his focus was also the Executive Mansion. He fought his way in, disembowelling President Tolbert in his bed.

We visit Red Light market. Aubrey: 'Why is it called Red Light?' Abraham: 'Because a set of traffic lights used to be here.' It is a circular piece of land, surrounded by small shops and swarming with street traders. The shops have names like the Arun Brothers and Ziad's, all Lebanese owned, as is the Mamba Point Hotel. Almost all small business in Liberia is Lebanese owned. Abraham shrugs: 'They simply had money at a time when we had no money.' The bleak punchline is Liberia's citizenship laws: anyone not 'of African descent' cannot be a citizen. Lebanese money goes straight back to the Lebanon.

Women crouch round the market's perimeter selling little polythene bags of soap powder. Some are from Wocdal (Women and Children Development Association of Liberia), funded by Oxfam. Wocdal loans them 100 Liberian dollars for a day (less than US$2). This gives the women a slight economic advantage in Red Light, analogous to the one the Lebanese had over the Liberians in the Fifties: money when others have none. No one else in Red Light can afford to buy a full box of soap powder. This the women sell in pieces, keeping the profit, and returning the $100 to Wocdal. It is a curious fact that a box of soap powder, sold in many small parts, generates more money in the third world than the first. A woman with five children tells us this enables her to send two of them to school. The other three work alongside her in the market. 'I send the 14- and 15-year-olds to school, because they will be finished sooner,' she explains. 'The five, six- and seven-year-olds work with me.'

Thursday

From the 4x4, West Point does not look like a 'flagship project'. A narrow corridor of filth, lined on either side with small dwellings made of trash, mud, scrap metal. Children with distended bellies, rotting food, men breaking rocks. It stretches for miles. The vehicle sticks in an alley too narrow to pass. The visitors must walk. Close up, the scene is different. It is not one corridor. It is a city. Food is cooking. Small stalls, chicken skewers for sale. Children trail Aubrey wanting their photograph taken. They pose boldly: big fists on knobby, twiggy arms. No one begs. We stop by a workshop stockpiled with wooden desks and chairs, solid, not un-beautiful. They are presently being varnished a caramel brown. A very tall young white man is here to show us around, Oxfam's programme manager at West Point. 'This,' he says, plac ing both hands hard on the nearest desk for emphasis, 'is great workmanship, no?' Lysbeth peers at the wood: 'Um, you do know that's not quite dry?'

Patrick Alix is 30 years old. He is distinctly aristocratic-looking, half French, and so unrelievedly serious the urge is to say stupid things in his presence. Before coming to West Point, Patrick was in Zambia doing emergency work, qualified as a chartered accountant, worked for the World Wildlife Fund in Indonesia, performed a management evaluation of the French nuclear fusion reactor programme, produced a reggae album in Haiti and played violin in the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. This is not an exhaustive list. He has seen the situation in Liberia progress from the direst emergency to the beginnings of 'development'. 'Basically, we've followed the returnees from the camps - many settled in this community - 65,000 people live here, 30,000 of them children. Now, there are 19 schools in the slum, yes? So...' Wait. There are schools in a slum? Patrick stops walking. 'Sure,' he says. 'But we're going to the only government one. The rest are private, sharing space with churches, or mosques, with volunteer teachers. There's also a teacher's council here, a commissioner, the township council - you understand the slum is a township? It's organised into blocks and zones. The area representatives call meetings. Otherwise nothing would get done.'

He sets off quickly through the chaotic little alleys, sure of his way. When we arrive Patrick says: 'You should have seen it before. This is the "after" picture!' Aubrey takes a photograph of the long, low concrete building; its four large, bare rooms. Patrick says: 'So Liberia has this unique freed-slave history... what this means is the government structures were simply borrowed; lots of titles - minister for this, minister for that - but that was cosmetic... now, things have changed, they've pledged 10 per cent of their budget to education, which is enormous percentage-wise, but still only US$12m for the whole country. There's too much to be done right now. NGOs fill the gap. What you saw back there was part of our livelihood project: fathers are taught how to make school furniture, which we the school buy from them at a fair price. They also sell this furniture to all the schools in West Point. And mothers make the uniforms - if that doesn't sound too traditionally gendered...'

Standing in front of the school are John Brownell, who manages the livelihood project, and Ella Coleman, who until recently was West Point's commissioner. Mr Brownell is a celebrity in West Point: he played football for Liberia. This took him to the US and Brazil. 'Rio de Janeiro!' he says, and smiles fondly, as if speaking of heaven. He is crisp-shirted despite the heat, broad as a rugby player. Ms Coleman is a kind of celebrity, too, well known throughout West Point. Hers is a hands-on approach to pastoral care. She will enter homes to check on suspected abuse. She keeps children at her own house if she fears for their safety. She is impassioned: 'We have seven-year-old girls being raped by big men! I talk to parents - I educate people. People are so poor and desperate. They don't know. For example, if a mother is keeping her child home to earn 50 Liberian dollars at the market, I say to her: "That will keep you for a day! What about the future?" One of our very young boys, he was always touching one of our girls, so I made him a friend. He was suspended - but sitting out there will not help. I went to his house. The whole family sleeps in one room. I said to his parents: "You have exposed these children to these things too early. Anything that happens to this little girl, I will hold you responsible!"'

And are some of your students ex-combatants? 'Oh, my girl,' says Ms Coleman sadly, 'there are ex-combatants everywhere. People live next to boys who killed their own families. We, as a people, have so much healing to do.'

Patrick explains logistics. The principal of the school is on US$30 a month. To rent a shack in the slum for a month is US$4 a week. Liberian teachers are easily bribed. You pay a little, you pass your exam. At university level the problem is endemic. Teaching qualifications are usually dubious. 'It's dull to repeat, but this all stems from extreme poverty. If you're a teacher living in a shack on a pile of rubbish, you'd probably do the same.' Mr Brownell speaks hopefully of the Fast Track Initiative, to which Liberia has applied for money. He puffs out his wide chest proudly. One of the aims is to reduce class size from 344:1 to 130:1. Patrick nods quickly: 'Yes, Big Man... but that will take three years - while strategies are being made, these children need something now. Look at them. They're waiting.'

'This is the sad truth,' says Brownell.

In the shade, four girls are instructed to speak with us. The conversation is brief. They all want to be doctors. They kick the dust, refuse to make eye contact. We have only inanities to offer anyway. 'It's good that you all want to be doctors. The doctors will teach new doctors. There'll be so many doctors in Liberia soon!'

Lysbeth sighs, murmuring: 'Except there's something like 23 Liberian doctors. And 14 nurses. In the whole country.'

The visitors wilt slightly; sit on a wall. The schoolgirls look on with pity - an unbearable reversal. They run off to help their mothers in the market. Meanwhile, Ms Coleman is still talking; she is explaining that at some point the government will clear this slum, this school, everything and everyone in it. She does not think the situation impossible. She does not yet suffer from 'charity fatigue'. She is saying: 'I trust it will be for the best. We made this community from the dirt, but we can't stay here.'

Friday

Bong Country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze. There are pygmy hippopotami here and monkeys; a sense of Liberia's possibilities. Rich in natural resources, cool in the hills, hot on the beach. Nyan P Zikeh is the Oxfam programme manager for this region. He is compactly built, handsome, boyish. He was educated during the last days of Tolbert's regime ('He was killed in my final year of high school'). Nyan helps rebuild the small village communities of Bong, a strategic area fought over by all the warring factions. People live in tiny traditional thatched huts arranged around a central ground. It is quiet and clean. The communities are close-knit and gather around the visitors to join the conversation. In one village a woman explains the food situation. She is '1-0-0', her children are (usually) '1-0-1'; there are many others who are '0-0-1'. It is a binary system that describes 'meals per day'. Still, things are improving: there are schools here now, there are latrines. Nyan's projects encourage the creation of rice paddies; the men work in them, the women take the rice to market. It is more than the subsistence farming that existed before the war. Nyan's dream is to connect all these villages in a trading ring that utilises Bong's strategic centrality and sells produce on to Monrovia.

Nyan: 'You have to understand, in this area, everything was destroyed. The largest displaced camps were here. We helped people go back to where their villages formerly were; we helped them rebuild. All that you see here was done with DFID money - the Department for International Development. They are Brit ish. They funded us with pounds 271,000 - they gave us this twice. And I am happy to say we met 100 per cent of our targets. Creating infrastructure and training individuals. The money went a very long way. It helped to train Liberian staff. It helped provide assistance at the county level for the ministry of health. It was quite an enormous help.'

'This is the good aid story,' says Lysbeth. 'People find that very boring.'

As we leave the village, the gardener in Lysbeth looks around for signs of soil cultivation. Heavy, wet palms cascade over each other, but there are no fields. Nyan prides himself on his frankness: 'We can't blame anyone else. The truth is we don't have the knowledge and skill about farming. It has always been slash, burn and plant. The only industrial farming our people have known here is the rubber plantations. That is the only major industry our people know. Everything else was not developed.'

There are such things as Third World Products. In the market where the women sell their rice, a boy's T-shirt reads 'David Beckham' but the picture beneath is of Thierry Henry. The plastic buckets the women carry have bad ink jobs - the colours run like tie-dye. The products no one else wants come to Liberia. 'And our meat is the same,' explains Nyan. 'Chicken feet, pig feet. That's what people are sold. More tendon than flesh. No nutritional value.'

Half a mile down the road, Mrs Shaw, an 80-year-old Liberian teacher, sits in front of her small home. She has taught three generations of Liberian children on a wage she describes as 'less then the rubber tappers: US$25 a month'. She says the children she teaches have changed, over the years. Now they are 'hot headed'. They are angry about their situation? She frowns: 'No, angry at each other.' As we leave, Lysbeth spots three graves in the yard. 'My sons,' says Mrs Shaw. 'They were poisoned.' Lysbeth assumes this is metaphorical, but Abraham shakes his head. He doesn't know what the poison is, exactly: maybe some kind of leaf extract. In the vehicle he explains: 'Her sons, they were working in government, quite good jobs. It happens that when you're doing well, sometimes you are poisoned. They put something in your drink. I always watch my glass when I am out.'

The visitors sit on the porch eating dinner at CooCoo's Nest, the second best hotel in Liberia. CooCoo, the owner, was a mistress of President Tubman's; she lives in America now. In her absence it is run by Kamal E Ghanam, a louche, chain-smoking Lebanese in a safari suit who asks you kindly not to switch on the light in your room until after 7pm. Kamal also manages the rubber plantation behind. He brings out the sangria as Abraham and Nyan bond. These two are members of a very small group in Liberia: the makeshift Liberian middle class, created in large part by the presence of the NGOs. 'It's difficult,' explains Abraham. 'Even if I paint my house, people begin talking. "He is Congo now." As soon as you have anything at all, you are isolated from the people.' They show off their battle scars, knife wounds from street robberies. Aubrey, who has been photographing the plantations, arrives. He has news: he met a rubber worker in the field.

'His name is David. He doesn't know his age - but we worked out with various references to events during war that he's about 35 years old. He has three living children and three who died. He was born on the plantation and has worked there since he was 10 or 12, he thinks. He wants to be able to keep his own children in school but at the current rate of pay he won't be able to afford to. He works seven days a week. He says workers on the plantation live in camps that were built in 1952. There are no schools or medical facilities nearby - anyway, he couldn't afford them. He taps about 50lb of raw latex per day. He said it's a long day, from sunrise until late.'

Aubrey is breathless and excited: we have the feeling that we are intrepid journalists, uncovering a great, unknown iniquity. In fact the conditions on Liberian rubber plantations are well documented. In a CNN report of 2005, Firestone president Dan Adomitis explained that each worker 'only' taps 650 to 750 trees a day and that each tree takes two to three minutes. Taking the lower of these two estimates equals 21 hours a day of rubber tapping. In the past, parents brought their children with them to help them meet the quota; when this was reported, Firestone banned the practice. Now people bring their children before dawn.

Kamal smokes, listens, sighs. He says: 'Listen, this is how it is,' as if talking of some unstoppable natural weather phenomenon. He pauses. Then, more strongly: 'Now be careful about this tapper. He is not from Firestone, I think. He is from a different place.' Nyan smiles. 'Kamal, we both know that plantation - it sells to a middleman who sells to Firestone. Everybody sells to Firestone.' Kamal shrugs. Nyan turns back to the visitors: 'Firestone is a taboo subject here, but it is better paid than most work. You would have to have a very strong lobby in the US government to stop them. The whole reason Firestone came to Liberia in the first place was as a means of creating a permanent supply of rubber for the American military. The British had increased the taxes on Malaysian rubber - the Americans didn't want to pay that. They needed a permanent solution. So they planted the rubber - it's not native to Liberia. Really, they created a whole industry. It sounds strange, but these are some of the best jobs in Liberia.'

Kamal goes inside to collect dessert. Abraham leans over the table.

'Do you know what people say? In 2003, when the war was at its worst, the only places in Liberia that were safe were the US embassy and Firestone. Everywhere else there was looting and killing. The American marines were offshore - we kept hoping they would come ashore. What were they waiting for? But we waited and then they sailed away. And that is when people got disappointed.'

Everyone at the table is asked why they think the war happened. Nyan says: 'Let me tell you first my candid feeling: every Liberian in one way or another took part in the war. Either spiritually, financially, psychologically or physically. And to answer your question: in a sense there was no reason. Brothers killed brothers, friends killed friends, only to come back the next day and regret they ever did it in the first place. For me the real reason was greed. And poverty. All that the warlords wanted was property. When they stormed Monrovia, they did not even pretend to fight each other. They killed people in their homes and then painted their own names on the walls. When Ms Sirleaf took over Guttridge's rubber plantation - US$2.8m a month - it was still occupied by rebel forces, and they refused to leave for a year and a half. They wanted to be in the rubber business. But they destroyed the trees - didn't tap them properly. It will take another 10 years to replant.'

Saturday

Lunch in La Pointe, the 'good restaurant' in Monrovia. The view is of sheer cliff dropping to marshland, and beyond this, blue-green waters. During the war the beach was scattered with human skulls. Now it is simply empty. In Jamaica, tourists marry on beaches like these. They stand barefoot in wedding outfits in white sand owned by German hotel chains and hold up champagne flutes, recreating an image from a brochure. This outcome for Liberia - a normalised, if exploitative, 'tourist economy' - seems almost too good to hope for. At present La Pointe is patronised solely by NGO workers, government officials and foreign businessmen. A Liberian passes by in a reasonably nice suit. Abraham: 'He's a supreme court judge.' Another man in a tie: 'Oh, he's Kenyan. He owns an airline.' Everywhere in Liberia it is the same: there are only the very poor and the very powerful. In the missing middle, for now: the 'International Community'. The monitoring agency Gemap (Liberia Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program) is in place. No government cheque over US$500 can be signed without their knowledge. It is very hard to be good in these conditions. President Johnson-Sirleaf has promised to review the 2005 Mittal Steel and Firestone concessions. We hope and pray. Behind our table an Englishman, a Lebanese and a Liberian are having a lunch meeting. Englishman: 'You see, I'm worried about management morale. The troops soon feel it if management is low. At the moment it's like a bloody sauna in there. Maybe we could just give them a few things... a nice bed, bed sheets, something so they won't be bitten to death at night. They're so happy if you do that - you wouldn't believe it!'

Liberian: 'My friend, someone's going to get malaria. It's inevitable.'

Lebanese: 'This is true.'

Liberian: 'I ask you please not to worry about malaria - we get it all the time in Liberia. I promise you we are used to it!'

The history of Liberia consists of elegant variations on this conversation.

The Toyota rolls up in front of Paynesville School. Motto: Helping our selve through Development [sic]. Aubrey causes a riot in the playground: everyone wants their picture taken. Some are in uniform, others in NGO T-shirts. Fifty or so wear a shirt that says 'China and Liberia: Friendship Forever'. We are here only for one boy. We were given his name by Don Bosco Homes, a Catholic organisation that specialises in the rehabilitation of child ex-combatants.

He is very small for 15, with a close-shaved, perfectly round head and long, pretty eyelashes. He has the transcendental air of a child lama. Three big men bring him to us in a corner of the yard and go to fetch a chair. He stays the wrist of one of the men with a finger and shakes his head. 'It's too hot here to talk. We'll go inside.'

In a small office at the back of the school four nervous adults supervise the interview. Lysbeth, who has teenage children herself, looks as if she might cry even before Richard speaks. It's been a long week. Richard is determined to make it easy for us. He smiles gently at the dictaphone: 'It's OK. Are you sure that it's on?'

'My name is Richard S Jack. I was 12 in 2003. I was living with my mother when the second civil war began. I was playing on a football field when men came and grabbed me. It was done by force - I had no desire to join that war. They called themselves the Marine Force. They took both teams of boys away. They threw us in a truck. I thought I wasn't going to see my parents any more. They took me to Lofah Bridge. What happened there? We were taught to do certain things. We were taught to use AK-47s. I was with them for a year and a half. We were many different kinds of Liberians and Sierra Leoneans, many boys. The first one or two weeks I was so scared. After that it became a part of me. I went out of my proper and natural way. War makes people go out of their proper and natural way. It is a thing that destroys even your thoughts. People still don't know what the war was about. I know. It was a terrible misunderstanding. But it is not a part of me any more. I don't want violence in me any more. Whenever I sit and think about the past, I get this attitude: I am going to raise myself up. So I tell people about my past. They should know who I was. Sometimes it is hard. But it wasn't difficult to explain to my mother. She understood how everything was. She knew I was not a bad person in my heart. Now I want to be most wise. My dream is to become somebody good in this nation. I have a feeling that Liberia could be a great nation. But I also want to see the world. I love the study of geography. I want to become a pilot. You want me to fly you somewhere? Sure. Come and find me in 10 years. I promise we will fly places.'

Afterword

On 17 November 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a class-action lawsuit against Firestone along with several plaintiffs, now adult, who had been child labourers and their children, who are currently child labourers, on the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia. This lawsuit is ongoing. For more information, go to www.stopfirestone.org. To read Firestone's own account of its business in Liberia, go to www.firestonenaturalrubber.com.

· For more information on Oxfam's work in Liberia and around the world, or to make a donation, go to www.oxfam.org.uk/donate;0870 333 2500