The UN hands out clean drinking water for free, and then Liberians sell the bags for around 10 cents a bag. It keeps the population hydrated, but also provides some small income to the most desperate.

Worn down delapidated buidings house thousands of people.

We joked about it the other day. Our photo collections have such little variety. Children (seeing as such a majority of the population is under 15 years of age), bombed buildings and UN convoys.

These photos line several walls in town, photos of loved ones missing since the war.

You can find all sorts of useless remedies for conditions mentioned above. One baby was born with a cleft lip and the Mum was advised that snake livers were the only cure. The mother trekked for hours each day seeking out snakes to kill, as the baby became progressively malnourished. The idea of snake liver may seem ridiculous to us in the West, but for a mother with no education (which is the only reason that we know that snake liver wont help) she would trek to the ends of the earth if she thought she would find a cure. Praise God we found that baby in time.

Bombed buildings like this can house countless people. This old bombed school houses 2 families.

The gate to the Port where Mercy Ships is docked.

I dont know what the game is called in Australia, but in the US it is Tetherball. Where you hit a ball around a pole, in the opposite direction to your opponent until someone has fully wrapped it around the pole. This is the Third World version, at a small school; a small sack with sand tied to a wooden pole.

Toy cars. Boys of all ages pull these toy cars behind them on strings, the cars made of anything found at the trusty local trash pile. The bases of these cars are made from sardine tins, the wheels from some aluminium top, and the roof of the one to the right is a hairspray can. Quite ingenious creations!

In my third blog I mentioned a delapidated hotel where thousands of squatters now live. On a recent visit a friend of mine noticed in one communal room that there are chalk marks on the walls. When he asked one of the locals why, my friend was told that a majority of the squatters are children, and that one of the adults in the building started school for them. With no chalk boards they had used the walls to scribble out sums. We went out to the building the other night to paint new chalkboards (yeah, I didnt know either, but chalkboards are painted on wooden backboards). There are 5 classrooms, with around 20 kids in a classroom of this size, students sitting on bricks and scraps of wood.

Another classroom for 15 kids, with just this one bench.

The work is of a fair standard considering the teachers have little education themselves.

The sandbox at the back of the room, where children play with bottles and plastic containers. It can be a little surreal sometimes, seeing them play with what we consider trash, in a similar way to kids back home playing with proper play equipment.

At lunch break the kids slide on cardboard boxes down the empty pool.

A note of warning written on a wall in one of the dark stairwells inside the building. 'Any rogue caught in Ducor Palace will be treated violently'.

The children of Ducor Palace.

I do too. How hard it will be to leave you in 2 months.