What little aid Liberia receives from the outside world is funneled through a myriad of NGOs ¡ nongovernmental organizations ¡ that work to get the Liberian people back on their feet.

"The most important thing for us now is to produce our own food," says Patrick Lah, director of Agricultural Relief Services, which also works to increase rice production and goat populations.

The cash crop nursery program will help 240 local farmers, but 5,000 applied for assistance.

"The Ministry of Agriculture will have to come in," says Lah. "Nimba County is big, and for one NGO to respond to the needs of the farmers is a big challenge."

But he sees the government doing very little to help in this place, where farm-to-market roads are in awful shape and people still fear armed conflict.

During the war, families fled their villages and left their crops untended. Replanted coffee, cocoa and palm groves take years to bear fruit again.

One coffee farm visited by the workers of Catholic Relief Services and Agricultural Relief Services was barely distinguishable from the jungle around it. Plants that had once been carefully pruned grew high in the air or slumped against fallen trees.

Relief workers say villages like this were vacated because soldiers who came looking for food were rarely content just to fill their stomachs. They made wild, arbitrary, even silly accusations and beat and terrorized villagers who had put up no resistance in the first place.

"It was just a bunch of nonsense," one of the Liberians chuckled as workers came down the trail after giving aid workers a tour of the coffee grove.

In Monrovia, the Lutheran World Service works to repair minds and hearts with its trauma-healing programs, which bring broken people and former combatants together in a spirit of reconciliation. Healing the psychological scars of the war may be the toughest, but most essential, task.

The relief effort To learn more about the nongovernmental aid organizations providing relief efforts in Liberia, or to make a donation, contact the following: Catholic Relief Services: www.catholicrelief.org, (800) 919-9338 ADRA ¡ a Seventh-day Adventist aid organization ¡ www.adra.org, (888) 237-2367 Lutheran World Relief: www.lwr.org, (800) 597-5972 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, www.usaforunhcr.org, (800) 770-1100

"If it was like an earthquake,'' explains Bill Saa, a trauma-healing instructor, "the reconstruction and recovery process in itself would be fast -- even though it would be an enormous task -- because we would have to face nobody else but God. And who questions God so much?"

But, he says, "this was a war fought by man against man. Men wonder, why must my own brother, my own sister, my own friend, my own relative, hurt me so badly? So people find it hard to cope with that, and that's why we're trying to help people to at least see reasons to rebuild."

Often, the need to do more with less breeds financial creativity.

In the southeast, ADRA ¡ the Seventh-day Adventist aid organization ¡ finds innovative ways to support schools. For example, Fishtown, a coastal village where the Tubman family had farms in the 1800s, has taken a small loan from ADRA and outfitted a fishing canoe to raise money to pay for books and teacher salaries.

Lah likens the state of Liberia today to the seedlings in his nursery's care.

"If we continue to receive assistance from people and continue in peace, it is just like you are watering the plant."

'The Tubman myth'

Several nights after the Musu's outing, John Hilary Tubman visits a tavern in downtown Monrovia that stands in the shadow of Providence Church. The stony sanctuary was the first place freed American slaves worshipped in their new home in the 1820s, years before the Tubmans arrived in 1837.

The hiss and heat of matches flaring and jazzy saxophonic tunes fill the tavern as John Hilary greets his public with his bold voice and hearty embraces. Before he hits his seat, a bottle of Dewar's White Label Scotch is retrieved from his personal locker in a wood cabinet behind the bar, and it, with a glass of ice, beckons him to his spot at the bar.

The crowd here tonight is decidedly upscale and old money.

Life at its simplest ­ a hat too big, overalls tied on by one strap and a bowl of rice under an outdoor shelter ­ keep this young boy in the farmbelt, and most Liberians, going from one day to the next. JONATHAN ERNST/STAFF

A man in a business suit and a loosened necktie greets him with a booming hello and a bear hug.

He is Jimmy Pierre, one of President Taylor's personal lawyers. His father was chief justice about the time John Hilary's father was president.

The two men swap the usual friends and family stories ¡ who's sick, who has died.

When asked by an American visitor about the Tubman family, Pierre talks freely about John Hilary's father in front of him ¡ apologizing for his honesty when necessary.

"He was a great politician. He was a god," says Pierre, but Tubman would have served Liberia better if he'd left the presidency earlier and guided a successor as an elder statesman.

"He was like King Louis the XIV," he says, invoking the monarch who once declared himself so powerful as to be the state of France itself.

John Hilary chimes in with a story from the 1960s, when his father was about to undergo major surgery and, sensing his mortality, called his sons to him. He even summoned Shad, his oldest, home from America.

"Tomorrow they will open me up like a cow," their father told them. He called the boys close and kissed them on both cheeks.

"I have been president so long," he said, "ambitions have risen and ambitions have died. Forgive me."

The image hangs in the air with the smoke and jazz.

"What year was that?" asks Pierre. John Hilary guesses 1966 or '67.

Pierre shakes his head. "He should have left in '68."

John Hilary's father survived the surgery. He would survive until 1971, when his death left behind a successor who was assassinated on April 12, 1980, along with Americo-Liberian rule.

Pierre's father was executed in front of the mob 10 days later, one of the 13 government ministers shot dead, then left to bloat in the heat.

Pierre says the Tubman clan was spared "because the Tubman myth was still alive."

A path not taken

Lester Tubman Sr., 82, is not part of the Tubman myth. But he could have been. He's a lifelong Augustan, but he could have been a Liberian. He could have been a Liberian Tubman.

When emancipation came in 1863, Emily Tubman wanted Lester's grandfather Malachi and his grandfather's brother to have the same opportunity for a new life in Africa that she had given Richard's slaves in 1837.

Life in Liberia today 42.3: life expectancy at birth, compared to 64.7 years for people in developing countries 58.4: estimated percentage of Liberian population with access to safe drinking water 60: estimated percentage of Liberian schools disrupted or ruined by the civil war 80: percentage of Liberians who are illiterate 80: percentage of Liberian unemployment in the formal sector Sources: U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; UNICEF; U.S. Agency for International Development

"She sent for them after freedom; she sent for them to come down and she would have something to give them to remember her by,'' Lester says.

All of the freed slaves' inheritance hadn't been spent in the 1830s. The balance had been invested, and now Emily was offering it to those who wanted to take a similar journey.

Lester's great uncle took the money and went back to Africa. But Malachi Tubman didn't bother to find out what Emily had to offer.

"I understand that my grandfather didn't go back to get anything,'' Lester says. "He was too happy to get free, so they say.''

Lester wasn't raised in the rarified air the Tubmans breathed in Liberia.

He wasn't a president's son. His father, Calvin, ran a firewood yard in the section of Augusta once known as Nellieville. Lester blistered his hands helping his father, and he had to turn down a work-study scholarship to run sprints for Hampton University, in Hampton, Va.

"I can say that we worked for a living, but we always got along real well. I always had plenty to eat. It might not be the best kind of food, but I had hot cakes and syrup, biscuits and syrups, smoked sidemeat ¡ all that kind of stuff.''

As an adult, Lester worked for the post office for 30 years.

"Tell you the truth, I really don't have any complaints. I've had to work, but I was able to have a lot. My wife and I raised four children,'' he says.

He doesn't give much thought to what his life might have been like if his grandfather had gone to Liberia.

"I really don't know if he would have gone there and done better. Possibly, yes. I don't know.''

Lester and his family might have fared better if his grandfather had made a different choice. Of course, he might be a refugee, too. His kin might have been set aside for greatness, and they might have been set up for a fall.