CAMARILLO : Relief Worker Will Return to Liberia

Just as the civil war in Liberia was heating up, Paul McDermott of Camarillo was getting out.

McDermott’s two-year stint in the Peace Corps was ending when the agency pulled its about 150 volunteers out of the West African nation. He returned to Camarillo to spend some time with his family then went to Washington, D.C., to look for a job.

He found one, overseeing food distribution for Catholic Relief Services--in Liberia.

“I’m kind of nuts, aren’t I?” said McDermott, 27, who is in Camarillo for the holidays but will head back to Africa next week.

When he returned to Liberia in May, he said, “the situation wasn’t so bad. I thought it would resolve itself in a month or so.”

Instead, the fighting grew more intense between rebel leader Charles Taylor and forces loyal to President Samuel K. Doe. The rebels eventually captured and killed Doe, but a multinational force led by Nigeria intervened. It controls Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, while Taylor’s army occupies the rest of the country, which is about one-fourth the size of California.

Since Nov. 28, a cease-fire has halted most of the bloodshed but not the starvation and malnutrition, McDermott said. “The whole country is in a bad way,” he said. “It was the most developed country in West Africa. The devastation is just incredible.”

McDermott, who makes sure that the relief agency’s food shipments are properly distributed, recalled the scene at Monrovia’s port when the first food shipment in nine months arrived on Oct. 25.

“Kids were scrambling for grains of rice,” he said. “Soldiers were beating them back. It was really bad. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He estimated that 90,000 to 100,000 people in the capital are undernourished and that 25,000 children are severely malnourished.

Chris Hennemeyer, an Africa specialist for the Baltimore-based relief agency, said the best estimate is that 50 Liberians starve to death every day. The problem is primarily in the capital, because the 400,000 residents have no local source of food and are cut off from the rest of the country.

McDermott said Liberia has gotten little news coverage since Iraq invaded Kuwait. “It’s unfortunate, because it came at a crucial time in the civil war,” he said.