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Masiaka, Sierra Leone - Adama Kamala adjusts her breast with the stumps of her forearm to feed her baby boy.
Adama, whose hands were hacked off by rebels three years ago, is one of 20 amputees who returned home recently as peace spreads through Sierra Leone after a decade of savage civil war.
Tens of thousands of fighters have disarmed in the West African country over the past few months under a UN-brokered peace plan, allowing aid workers to start resettling an estimated 400 000 people displaced by the conflict.
"I have no alternative but to forget," Adama said near Masiaka, a town on the crossroads 56km from the capital Freetown.
Sierra Leone's feared Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels chopped off her hands with a machete in early January 1999 as they launched an offensive on the capital to topple President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
As they closed in on the city, they burned and looted everything in their way, and amputated the limbs of civilians.
"I asked them: Why are you cutting my arms? They said: So that you can go back to your president and ask him to give you a new pair of hands," said Adama, who was 14 at the time and has been living since in a special camp in Freetown.
The rebels were forced eventually to pull back, leaving terror behind them. After more clashes and atrocities on both sides, a ceasefire signed in November 2000 has halted most the fighting, despite occasional skirmishes.
Those same rebels now say they want peace and are sitting at the negotiating table with Kabbah's government while the United Nations has its biggest field operation in the former British colony.
UN peacekeepers have been allowed to deploy throughout the country, even in the northern and eastern rebel strongholds, rich with the diamonds which helped fund the conflict.
The return to peace has given humanitarian organisations an opportunity to help the displaced rebuild their lives.
Each of the 20 amputees who has returned to the Masiaka region has on average 10 relatives listed as dependants. The UN World Food Programme is giving them two months worth of food rations - maize, vegetable oil and beans.
"The idea is for them to become independent," said WFP programme officer Aya Schneorson. "But we will have to come back to check on them because they are so vulnerable."
The Norwegian Refugee Council, a non-governmental organisation, has also built new concrete houses for them and their families.
Although Masiaka witnessed heavy fighting and changed sides several times during the war, it has basic facilities such as schools and there is a clinic nearby - a luxury compared to other parts of the country.
But it is difficult to imagine how life could ever go back to normal for people like Abdul Sankoh, a 31-year-old teacher who also had his hands hacked off - this time by soldiers of the Sierra Leonean army.
"My prostheses are beyond repair. If I can't hold the chalk to write, there is not very much I can do," he said.
"I'm happy the war is over because war is destruction. But even if I can forget, I don't forgive."
