Irish aid workers are helping locals rebuild their lives - and a road at 8,000 feet. Declan Walsh reports from Eritrea

On A rocky path in the highlands of Eritrea, Said Saleh, a 14- year-old schoolboy, lists his subjects. "English, Arabic, history, maths," he says, twisting a leaky biro in his scribble-covered palm. "But the difficult one, that is geography."

Little wonder. To get to school, Said follows a rocky trail that is in equal measures breathtakingly beautiful and, at 8,000 feet, lung-pinchingly tough. Twisting through a mountain range, the journey takes two and half hours each way. "Three, when we are slow," he adds, his adolescent feet bursting through a pair of plastic sandals that look two sizes too small.

The path of learning has never been easy, but up on the Qohaito plateau it is steep, rocky and inhabited by baboons.

Eritrea is only starting to recover from a devastating two-year war with neighbouring Ethiopia, which ended in 2000. One in three people are still dependent on international food aid. More than 4,400 United Nations troops are patrolling the border area, more than 200 of them Irish.

A famously resilient people, the Eritreans are starting to rebuild their lives. And on the network of treacherous paths that lace the Qohaito plateau, Concern, the Irish aid agency, is giving them a helping hand. But instead of handing out food, it is paying to repave or freshly cut about 70 kilometres of the spectacular, isolated mountain routes.

The paths - giant, boulder-strewn staircases that cling to the flanks of vertiginous peaks - have been around since the beginning of Christian times.

They were used by Arab traders passing south from the ancient Red Sea port of Adulis to the Kingdom of Axum, in present-day northern Ethiopia. Incense and spices went in, ivory and other goods came out.

Now the routes are showing their age. They are often impassable during the rainy season, either due to floods or large boulders that have fallen across the paths. Some slopes are nothing more than slippery scree, making passage for laden camels and donkeys difficult, if not impossible.

Then there are the baboons, which sometimes harass passers-by and have even blocked paths with rocks. "Ladies must be accompanied," says Ibrahim Omar, a local guide. "The baboons can even try to rape them."

Now an architect from Asmara, the capital, has been contracted to renew the routes cut by the traders. By the time work is completed, this summer, the road will be easier, if not shorter, for students like Said. But the real difference will be for traders, animal herders and the sick and injured. Lives will be improved and lives will be saved. And most of the work, budgeted to cost £54,000, will be carried out by the villagers.

The area is inhabited by the Saho, one of Eritrea's nine main ethnic groups, who are Muslims. With its clear, sunny climate and spectacular views - maps show a tortured web of contour lines - the area should be a Mecca for adventurous hikers, walker and gliders. But Eritrea has been at war for 32 of the past 40 years, so tourists are almost as rare as peace.

During the final stages of the last fight with Ethiopia, in May 2000, the front line was in Senafe, 10 miles to the south of the plateau.

Now the town is home to thousands of displaced civilians who cannot yet return home.

A team of de-miners is working across a broad plain riddled with mines on the road into town, where soldiers from both sides were mowed down or blown up in the war's brutal fighting.

Eighteen months into a ceasefire agreement, ordinary people on both sides want to put the war far behind them. The rebels who fought Ethiopia for 40 years were famously self-sufficient, making everything from oil lamps to drugs in secret mountain caverns. These days, people are just as determined to get back to normality.

For the Saho, that means bee-keeping. Part of a rich and ancient tradition, Saho keepers know almost by instinct which of the hardy mountain flowers produce the sweetest red or white honey. They goad swarms of bees into hollowed-out logs, sealed at either end with cow dung but with a central aperture to allow the honey-makers in and out.

They are drawn by the queen bee, which the keepers have captured and imprisoned in a miniature cage, complete with leather walls and a line of cactus pines for bars.

The age-old industry was badly damaged by the war. At Karibosa, a village of square stone houses tucked under a towering rock face, Ahmed Salih Omerdin explains why his swarms disappeared during the final offensive.

"There was a lot of shelling, and due to the noise and smoke they left their hives. They haven't come back," he says, gesturing at seven empty hives.

Now Concern is helping the bee-keepers back into business, with grants to buy new swarms at local markets - they cost about €16.50/£13 each - and also with wooden beehives, which are easier to maintain and produce a cleaner, more saleable honey.

As with the paths project, the assistance was chosen by local people. "We asked them to list what they wanted, and this was a priority," says Columba O'Dowd of Concern. "And it's environmentally friendly, too, because if we had given them goats it would have created further soil erosion."

The war started over a dispute about the exact position of Ethiopia's border with Eritrea. A border commission in The Hague is adjudicating on the tortured question and is due to deliver its decision next month. If both sides stick to their promise to respect its findings, only then will the war officially be declared over.

On the Qohaito plateau, with its ringside view of the former front lines, you can almost taste the hankering for peace in the thin mountain air.

Ethiopian troops overran the village of Mai Tsada, destroyed its school and forced the population into hiding in caves on a neighbouring plateau. Tibletz Meretse fled in 1998, after an Ethiopian shell landed in a stand of cactus plants just 20 metres from her home. The mother of four spent the next two years on the run, leaving her blind brother behind in the compound of the village's Orthodox church.

He survived, but when she returned her home had been looted. "We left with nothing and returned with nothing," she says. Nevertheless, she says she could live with their neighbours.

"Previously, we were with the Ethiopians. Then the war came, unfortunately," she says. "But for the future, we hope for peace and to live together."