In a world fairer than this, Sarah Mayson might have been a soul singer. With a dark indigo headband, long purple earrings and eyelids painted to match, she looks the part. And the girl can sing. Her voice, strong and velvety, drifts through the refugee camp, sweetening the thick, stagnant air.

I don't understand her native language, Madingo, but the tone of her lyrics makes me think of WH Auden's World War II poem, Refugee Blues.

"Once we had a country and we thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you'll find it there: We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now."

Sarah is a pastor and gospel singer at Budumburam refugee camp in coastal Ghana. She fled Liberia during the late nineties, at the height of a conflict that killed 250,000. One million others did the same, seeking refuge in neighbouring countries.

Some of the 40,000 that sought shelter at Budumburam camp shook off the refugee label months ago, returning to a shaky but stable Liberia on a UN helicopter, a wing and a prayer. Others opted to make their way back overland, rejecting UNHCR's 20kg luggage limit and $100 handouts. Some couldn't face either the physical or emotional journey, seeking resettlement in countries like Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire.

And some, like Sarah, didn't fit either option. When, in early 2008, the Ghanaian Government announced the closure of Budumburam, Sarah was one of those arrested for staging a naked protest. Hundreds of women stripped, calling for the handout to be raised ten-fold to $1000. Instead they were detained or deported.

Budumburam is scheduled to close sometime this year. With a school, football pitch, shops and nightclubs, it feels more like a town than a refugee camp. Over the years, houses have sprung up, families have been created, babies born.

For eighteen-year-old Angeline, the prospect of leaving is hard to grasp. She arrived at the camp in nappies, she says. Now she has a baby of her own, Edwin, six months old and full of smiles. When Angeline's friend Teetee tells me she is eager to return to Liberia - "the men are much better there" she says - her elderly mother shakes her head despondently.

Although Liberia is no longer in the grip of war, tough living conditions persist. Budumburam's refugees say they are afraid to return to poor sanitation, over-subscribed schools and a mattress on the floor of someone they used to know. Liberia's rate of unemployment, they add, will depress them. $100 is not enough to establish a business, they say. And they won't feel safe. We still have old war enemies, some say.

There are things they don't say, too. Not to me, at least. They don't talk about the weighty prospect of starting over, the prospect of building a life from scratch - again. Or what it must feel like to return to a land that took your husband, your mother, your children, your sense of pride. They don't talk about living in limbo or the imminent loss of existing friendships. They don't openly discuss the emotional stability that Budumburam must provide, or whatever foggy notion of 'home' it offers.

Instead they sing. "We sing to keep ourselves going, to come alive, to free all the worries inside our heads" says Sarah, breathlessly, as the tempo picks up. I want to ask about the lyrics, but instead I turn to Auden.

"Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors; A thousand windows and a thousand doors; Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours" he wrote.

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