Sonnie Marlay, Liberia "I am alone, I am always alone"

Sonnie Marlay disappears into the darkness of her mud-brick house at Laine camp in Guinea and returns carrying a small plastic bag containing her most precious belongings - her Liberian refugee card and an old photograph of her husband and two of her four children that she hasn’t seen or heard of for 16 years.

Tears course down the old woman’s face as she pulls out the photograph, creased and tattered from handling. From the image, a young handsome man - her husband - sits in his best suit, smiling for the camera. Their two oldest children stand bashful by his shoulders.

Sonnie doesn’t know how old she is. Camp officials estimate she is about 55, but her weathered face and hands and tufts of grey hair peeking out from beneath her head-cloth make her look older.

The snapshot was taken at some forgotten family celebration long before the war erupted in Liberia and Sonnie and her husband and four children fled for shelter. She hasn’t seen or heard of any of the five since. She reluctantly assumes they are dead.

“All my friends have their families around them, their grandchildren. But not me. I am alone, I am always alone.

I am from Barba, that is my village in Nimba county. I was a businesswoman there, buying and selling on the market - fish and rice. All was going fine.

Then the war came and it was all gone, including my husband and my children.

The day that the rebels came to my village, my children were at school and my husband was at work on the railroad. As Charles Taylor’s men came, everybody scattered - I don’t know where.

I was sick that day, at home in bed. So the rebels caught me. They held me and I had to beg for my life. They were a mixed group - some grown men and some young boys - but they had guns.

They stabbed me in the leg and pulled my arms behind my back. My arms are still damaged after all these years.

When they released me, a friend helped me find a car to the border. But we crashed. I spent many weeks with a local healer in a village in Cote d’Ivoire. I stayed in Cote d’Ivoire until the war came again (in 2002) and that was when I came to this camp here in Guinea.

Other people have found their families. But I have had no word of mine. I have not seen them, and no one I know has seen them.

I hear there is peace now in Liberia, and yes, thank you for that. They want me to go back, but tell me who can I go back with? I cannot go back, I beg you. I just want to find a place where I can enjoy myself until I die.”