Liberians Frustrated Despite Refugee Aid Policy : Africa: Government avoids encampments and their squalor. Displaced people are scattered among villages. The arrangement creates its own brand of headaches.

Twenty-five miles from the highway, down a bone-rattling dirt road, near the murky river that forms the Liberian border, Jonathan Waah Howe stood in silent frustration while sacks of rice were loaded onto other refugees’ heads and carried away.

For reasons he did not understand, Howe was not among those getting the food handout, leaving him and dozens of other Liberian refugees to beg, buy, borrow and maybe steal to get by.

Unlike other African countries that have found themselves host to hordes of refugees, the Ivory Coast is not herding them into squalid camps but rather is experimenting with trying to absorb them into its own villages. That scattering of refugees is causing headaches in the distribution of aid.

From the seaside city of Tabou to Tai about 90 miles inland, the lush region along the meandering Cavally River is overrun with Liberians who have fled the 5-year-old civil war in their homeland.

Dazed men, women and children walk for days in the West African bush to get here, eating roots and dirt, many suffering from malaria, malnutrition and festering sores.

The war has displaced half of Liberia’s 2.6 million people. An estimated 350,000 are in Ivory Coast, 100,000 of them coming since mid-September.

The Liberians are in far better shape than most African refugees. They are few compared to the millions who spilled out of Rwanda; the Ivory Coast is peaceful and well-developed; aid officials work tirelessly on their behalf.

Yet aid workers still are struggling with the flow, a sign that even under the best circumstances Africa’s refugee problem defies good intentions.

The Ivorian government says its no-camp policy is purely humanitarian and safer for the refugees. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which tries to register each Liberian, agrees.

“This is their best protection, the fact they are mixed with the population,” said a U.N. spokesman, Raouf Issaka. “No (Liberian) faction would attack an Ivorian village.”

But integration is creating headaches for aid workers trying to keep track of scattered refugees. Many refugees say they would rather be in camps where basic needs could be provided.

Howe, a sorrowful-looking, 48-year-old who used to be a school principal, thought he had registered properly as a refugee but discovered he was in the wrong town to get his aid allotment.

“They haven’t quite forgotten us, but obviously they haven’t done for us what they should,” Howe said of the Ivorian government and the United Nations.

Down the road in Djobly-Pata II, another refugee ghetto, a U.N. worker was similarly frustrated. She had driven to the isolated village specially to register an elderly woman with seven children. The woman was not there.

“Well, how many old women with seven children are there in this village?” the exasperated aid worker asked the local chief as a crowd gathered.

Villagers said the woman had started walking toward Tabou, about 15 miles away, because a child was sick and there was no doctor in her assigned village.

Such frustrations have been exacerbated by fresh fighting in Liberia that started in September after a peace accord collapsed, touching off another refugee exodus.

“The biggest problem we’re facing is with new arrivals,” said John Doe, a refugee who keeps U.N. records of Liberians in Djobly-Pata II.

“There’s no housing for them, so in one room we’re lodging 10, 15 people. There are no materials to build housing. There are no latrines, so people use the river and then get sick from the water. Then there is no medicine.”

Of the village’s 840 residents, 825 are Liberians. In Tabou, the population of 45,152 includes 36,839 refugees. In the region, about 210,000 of the 296,000 people are refugees.

Combatants from Liberia’s seven warring factions are not supposed to receive aid, but it is impossible to tell who is who in the crowds. Suspected combatants denied registration in one place can trek to another and try again.

Some refugees try to register at more than one town to get extra rations, borrowing a few Ivorian children for the day to claim bigger families and get still more food.

One man, appearing to be in his 20s, presented a U.N. worker with a long list of names he said were his children. When the registrar expressed doubts, the man ripped the list in half. When he still was not believed, he ripped it again.

Such cheating is common. Tabou’s bustling market offers sacks of rice and European Community-donated cooking oil that has been bought from Liberians by Ivorians who sell it back to other Liberians at a profit.