Laine, Guinea — The Liberia Returnee Network, a group of former refugees have visited the Laine Refugee Camp in Guinea to ascertain for themselves the condition the Liberian refugees are faced with.
The team headed by Emmanuel Tyrone Marshall met with the camp president Henry Massaquio and had a meeting with hundreds of Liberians most of whom were women and children.
At the town hall meeting, the team from the Liberia Returnee Network encouraged the refugees in the Laine Refugee Camp to come back to Liberia and start a new life instead of living in a camp and thinking that they will be taken to the United States or other developed countries.
“We have bought 10 acres of land in Bomi County to take you guys there. It will be done voluntarily. We are not going to force anyone. You do not deserve to be here. And do not think that you are going to travel abroad. Someone has already gone on your name,” Mr. Marshall told the refugees.
Ma Felecia, 45, mother of eight, says despite finding it unbearable to live on Laine refugee camp in Guinea; how to start a new life when she and her family return to her native Liberia is something worrisome.
Liberia’s civil war ended in 2003 with three successful elections. Yet, thousands of Liberians are staying sheltering in camps in the lush forest region of neighboring Guinea. They want to come home but worry about their wellbeing.
They live in mud-brick houses in the Laine refugee camp. The camp has been a home to at least over 2,000 Liberian refugees. The camp, 75 km east of the southern Guinean town of Nzerekore, lies close to two borders, a bare day’s walk through forest to Cote d’Ivoire and a little further to their homeland Liberia.
Ma Felecia and her family, like many families, do daily hire work to survive. They are not allowed to make their own farm but worked as laborers on the farms of their host Guineans.
She told FrontPageAfrica that they at the camp paid to use the land at the back of the houses to make their gardens.
There is no medical facility at the camp and their children are languishing in the camp not going to school.
The inhumane treatments have left them with no option but to come back to Liberia. Despite wanting to come back, how they are going to start their new life in Liberia scares them the most.
“I and my family want to be the first to go back home. I was fat but see I am slim and reduced. We are suffering here and we want to go back home but how will we go back home? We do not want to try for ourselves, let the government help us and take us from Guinea. We want to go back home,” Ma Felecia said.
Ma Felecia added: “Liberia is our country but we do not have a place to stay when we go back home. We need a place to stay while we are hustling for ourselves.”
Patience Kuo, mother of 5, is another refugee in the Laine Refugee Camp. She wants to return but worries about her children’s future when they return.
“For me, I am not looking for help now but my children. I am here and it is the bush I can go to get my daily bread. We are into the bushes finding a contract to feed our children. So, we need the government to help us to go back home. We are not thinking about ourselves anymore, it is our children’s future we are worrying about,” Patience Kuo said.
She added: “This place is just like hell. We are suffering. We can go 6am in the morning to cut rice from the farm for the Guineans and come back by 8pm. We can cut 10 parcels of rice before we can get one for ourselves.”
Eric Kollie is another refugee, he explains: “You see our faces; we look like old men in this refugee life. We are suffering here. We have no right here. Even when we are sick, when we call upon our counselor he cannot come to our aids. The water we are drinking here, we pay for it.”
Henry Massaquio is the chairman of the Laine Refugee Camp. He says his people’s rights have been violated countlessly without redress from the Guinean authority.
“We the Liberians that are here, the people always tell us that we are no more refugees. We are praying to God they should not come and beat us from this place overnight,” he said.
Massaquio added: “We want to go back home at least we can manage like the way we are managing here.”