JESUS COME! DEVIL GO!

After seven years of brutal conflict, Liberia attempts to pick up the pieces using the best natural resource it's got--its people.

"Jesus come! Devil go!" sings the group of men as we pick our way through the debris of their broken village. In our midst Father Gary Jenkins, S.M.A., in a white cassock, uses a palm leaf to flick holy water onto wrecked, graffiti-covered mud huts. In a space where a house had once been lie two human skulls.

This is the first time these men have set eyes on their village of Gonzipo in two years. They are victims of the civil war that erupted in Liberia on Christmas Eve of 1989 and ended with an August 1996 peace accord. Armed men belonging to the United Liberation Movement for Democracy in Liberia (ULIMO)--one of the factions that waged the bloody conflict--forced the people of Gonzipo to flee in 1994 and then stole anything of value and destroyed the village. The villagers, along with most of their Gola tribe, fled to mud-hut camps built on the edge of Monrovia, Liberia's capital. There they survived on food rations consisting of 19 cups of rice and three small bottles of cooking oil per month, provided by the United Nations' World Food Programme.

Founded by the American Colonization Society as a home for freed American slaves, Liberia declared its independence in 1847 and is Africa's oldest republic. It is a country blessed with many natural resources, such as diamonds, gold, iron ore, and rubber.

Before the war, American and European companies made large profits from these industries without significantly improving living conditions. It was these lucrative industries that fueled the conflict that claimed the lives of more than 150,000 people. Several armed factions, based loosely on tribal groupings, battled for supremacy, bleeding their country dry in the process. While armed fighters lived on the spoils looted from conquered towns and villages, the warlords who led the factions amassed personal fortunes through the export of timber and minerals from the areas they controlled. Meanwhile the American companies withdrew, leaving the Liberians to their own fate.

The Gola are subsistence farmers and make up the majority of the population of Bomi County--an area of rain forest lying immediately to the north of Monrovia. The diamond mines of this area attracted armed factions like bees to honey. The fighting for control of the mines is what forced the Gola from their lands.

The Gola are traditionally a Muslim tribe, and when Jenkins, a member of the Society of African Missions, began working with them in 1977, there were no Catholics among them. Today there are at least 1,200 Gola people baptized in the Catholic Church and hundreds more receiving instruction. Jenkins endured the exile from Bomi County along with his parishioners.

Gaia Hills, a small village in Bomi County, is one of 11 centers in which Jenkins celebrates weekly Mass, now that most of the county's people have returned from the camps. Here the sounds of drums and beautiful voices fill the mud-brick chapel during the offertory at Mass, as a dozen girls dance up the aisle with their offerings. They are clad in brightly colored dresses and step in perfect rhythm, their faces a picture of concentration until, on handing their offering of fruit to Jenkins, they break into beautiful smiles. Many children from this and other villages died of malnutrition during the strife of the past few years.

After Mass, before we travel to the next village, the people load our jeep with their offertory gifts: a huge pile of bananas, grapefruit, palm nuts, and two chickens. These are presents for the people in the next village who are in even greater hardship than their brothers and sisters in Gaia Hills.

In Bomi Hills, the capital of Bomi County, Jenkins' former mission building lies in ruins on a small hill that bears testimony to the horror of this war. During 1996 men, women, and children who died of malnutrition were being buried here daily. The remains of 300 people lie in shallow graves, their resting places marked only by strips of yellow soil. On the other side of the hill, fighters dug for diamonds.

In 1997, former warlord Charles Taylor was elected president following a disarmament program by the West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG. According to the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, however, recent bouts of street fighting between Taylor's government and rival factions have created a serious humanitarian problem. And a September gun battle and standoff at the U.S. Embassy resulted in the airlift of former warlord Roosevelt Johnson, Taylor's ethnic Krahn rival.

One of the main obstacles to peace lies with the men who fought in the civil war. An estimated 60,000 Liberian men took up arms during this conflict. For some, the motivation was the loot that could be pillaged from the towns they ransacked. But many had little choice in taking up arms, often being abducted at gunpoint to carry loot and forced to join a faction. Some have lived this way since their early teens and know of no other way of life. For these men, peace holds no great appeal.

In Monrovia, the Salesians are attempting to change this. They run rehabilitation centers for ex-combatants, who are taught basic literacy skills and trained in crafts such as carpentry. These projects rely on the principal of "learning and earning"--the aim being to give them a skill that they can use immediately to support themselves. Numerous successful initiatives have been set up, ranging from a Don Bosco hairdressing salon to a Don Bosco courier service (named after Salesian founder Saint John Bosco). In this way, the church in Liberia is reaching out to both the sinners and sinned against. While Jenkins ministers to the Gola in Bomi County, the Salesians in Monrovia are trying to bring Christ's love to their oppressors. But not without pain and sacrifice.

In 1994, five American nuns died in an ambush in Monrovia. One of them, Sister Barbara Ann, had worked alongside Jenkins, setting up a desperately needed health clinic in Bomi County. Other religious have been lucky to survive. Father Patrick Kabu, a Liberian priest, was locked in a room in Monrovia's Catholic cathedral by armed fighters who then set the building on fire. He managed to escape.

The Gola people are reluctant to express too much confidence in their country's future. They have ridden too long on the roller coaster of high expectation and deep despair to risk being overly optimistic. But they are a people of incredible resilience who have long since learned to smile in the face of adversity. In these folk, whose greatest desire is to live in peace, Liberia has a resource even more valuable than diamonds and gold.