This is Caroline Gluck, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Press Officer, and I’ve been visiting border areas in Liberia, very close to where the fighting’s been in Ivory Coast. Today I went to Wedger’s (?) main hospital, the Market Hoplin (?) Memorial Hospital, where doctors told me they treated more than 15 people for gunshot wounds, injuries sustained when they were trying to leave their villages which were under attack by armed rebels. I met one of them, his name was Simon Tay(?), he’s 29 from the village called Saidly (?) which is in the district called Tillelepleur (?) and he told me he’s a farmer. He told me a story of how he got the gunshot wound. His family had fled the house when the fighting broke out. But they came back the next day because they wanted to try and get some food, and his sister was with him. But when they were in the house, gunmen entered again. He and his sister got separated, he then called out to find her, rushed towards her and held out his hand when a bullet went through his hand and went into his sister who fell on the ground. He fled and for the last two weeks, having made his way, a journey of four or five days, to Liberia, he’s been the last two weeks in hospital being treated. Obviously really devastated. He’s lost two fingers, he says he doesn’t think he’ll be able to work as a farmer in the future, and he’s not sure if his sister is dead or alive. These are some of the human tales of suffering as a result of the last month or so of fighting in Ivory Coast. It’s not just people like Simon who’ve been affected, but um, when many families fled and they’ve had a couple of days journey reaching Liberia, it’s been very difficult for the women especially, some of whom were heavily pregnant. Some even gave birth in the forest. And one thing that the hospital has seen is a lot of women who’ve come in severely anaemic , they’ve had to have blood transfusions, and they’ve been treated. Also, affected are some children, some who were already sick in the Ivory Coast , and there’s a ward, a therapeutic feeding centre, where I met a couple of them. One was a little girl, she was so painfully thin, she was weighing just five kilograms, and she’s a year and ten months old. Her normal body weight should be about 10-15 kilograms so that shows how tiny she is. And her mother told me that she was already quite bad back at home in Ivory Coast, but the whole experience of being in the forest with no food just made the situation far worse. So those are some of the human stories that I’ve been hearing. Today Oxfam put out a press release. We’re really worried that the approaching rains are going to make it really difficult to get aid to communities, to refugees, thousands of whom are not in any camps or transit centres, but still in border villages where it’s quite difficult to get aid right now, but with the approaching rains it’s going to be almost impossible to get aid to them. Our press release is called ‘the clock is ticking to help refugees’ and you can read it on our website which is www.oxfam.org.uk. And we’re basically warning that there’s a limited opportunity to get aid, to get help to these people before the rainy season. I have to say, last night again there was very heavy rain and this just makes it almost impossible for the trucks to go down heavily forested roads, they’re not even roads, they’re dirt tracks, and they’re heavily pitted now with lots of holes . As I said in my podcast yesterday, one truck that we’ve been trying to get into the village where we’ve been working, bringing in water, actually overturned one day, so that illustrates how hard the problem’s going to be, and unless people move from these border areas into larger areas, centres where we can get help to them effectively and easily, they risk being cut off from help altogether when the rainy season approaches. I think the next few days are going to be critical. We don’t know what is going to happen, we hear there’s heavy fighting in the most populous area, Abidjan, now for control for power. But meanwhile thousands of people are still arriving here in Liberia every day. They’re sick in many cases, they need help – they don’t have clothing, they don’t have food, they need shelter. These are the immediate needs, and these are needs that we hope to address in the next few days and weeks. This is Caroline Gluck for Oxfam, saying goodbye.