LIBERIA: Nobody knows when peacekeepers will arrive or what their mission will be, reports Declan Walsh in Monrovia.
"Nowhere is safe around here," said aid worker Karen Goodman Jones standing behind a wall of sandbags as lines of refugees walked past. A second later a gunshot rang out, sending her ducking to the ground.
"I think you see what I mean," she added.
As the tempo of fighting intensifies, Monrovia has become a city of stray bullets. Over 200,000 people have piled into Liberia's coastal capital to dodge fighting in the countryside outside. Their flight has proved futile.
Over the past nine days a fierce rebel offensive has rocked the city. Shells have rained down on churches and schools where families huddle, stray gunfire zings through the deserted streets. At least 200 have died and hundreds more have been wounded.
Even the city's safehavens have become perilous places.
The Graystone compound, a sprawling high-walled enclosure across the street from the US embassy, was once a genteel ocean-side home for American diplomats and their families. At the height of the Cold War, when Liberia was a key western ally, over 240 people lived here.
Now Graystone houses over 20,000 people, refugees who bed down under flimsy plastic and tarpaulin sheets between the boarded-up houses. The shelters offer small protection from the drenching tropical showers that come almost every day in this season. They offer even less from the downpour of shellfire and errant gunfire.
Last month over 50 people died in Graystone after shells smashed into the camp; these days stray gunfire is wounding dozens of people every day. On Saturday the camp doctor showed his tally - 35 on Thursday, 22 on Friday and 14 by lunchtime Saturday.
"It's raining bullets in there," said Magus Wolfe Murray of the British aid agency Merlin, which has converted two of the diplomatic villas into emergency surgeries and cholera treatment centres.
It is impossible to know which side is firing into the camp, and whether the fire is deliberate or accidental. Behind stands a tall building, once Monrovia's Intercontinental hotel and now a nest of government fighters.
Further beyond is the rebel-held port area.
Either way, the leafy camp makes for a perfect killing ground. Rounds ricochet off the rocky, angled ground while mortars detonate in the trees, sending a hail of deadly shrapnel flying at head height.
Usually the bullets hit their targets silently, probably falling to ground after being fired into the air by drunk or untrained soldiers hundreds of metres away. Sometimes they kill.
The remains of 12-year-old Asata Flomo lay inside a plastic hut. She had been shot in the back while lying on her mother's lap.
"They were sitting there, reciting stories, when she collapsed bleeding. The mother didn't know what had happened," a neighbour explained. Asata's family had fled the camp hours earlier.
Merlin has started building a wall of sandbags along Graystone's main pathway and around its clinics. "You can't protect everyone but at least it is something," said Ms Goodman-Jones.
"I'm scared but I can't go home," said Doris Solo, who said stray rounds regularly smacked into the tree above her shelter.
"Let those American people come. I am tired now." Some help is on the way but it will almost inevitably be too late for some.
The US has despatched over 2,000 troops by sea to Liberia, but they are not due to arrive for at least five days.
The White House has played down their role, saying the intervention will be "limited in time and scope", supporting a West African peacekeeping mission that has yet to deploy.
Nigeria is expected to announce the deployment of around 770 troops today, the vanguard of a larger West African force of about 3,600.
Saturday was Independence Day, marking Liberia's foundation by freed American slaves in 1847. There was little to celebrate.
Early in the morning, shells slammed into the Greater Refuge Temple church, killing three people inside and wounding about 50 more.
The attack made a mockery of a rebel ceasefire called on Friday evening.
"They say ceasefire but keep fighting," said Eric Zinnah, whose uncle died in the blast. "Since this war started it is us people, not the soldiers, that are being killed."
At a prayer rally, President Charles Taylor repeated his promise to leave office, but again refused to say when.
"As long as I am here you will continue to die," he told a crowd in the national soccer stadium, now home to 30,00 refugees.
"And for one man, Charles Taylor, Liberia cannot die".
The prayers were led by Dr K.A. Paul, an American evangelist of Indian origin who recently has become Taylor's spiritual advisor.
His long sermon drew the loudest cheers for his assurances that Mr Taylor would keep his word. "He does mean what he says," he said. "As soon as peace troops arrive, he's stepping down." But exactly when those peacekeepers will arrive - and what their mission will be - remains unclear.