In the Munigi cholera camp in northeastern Zaire, the very ground is infected by the dying. Nurse Isabel Subiros, wearing jeans and pink rubber gloves, steps carefully around the contaminated diarrhea and vomit and bloody needles. She accidentally pricked herself this morning. She tries not to think about it, or anything that is happening around her. "It is best just to work," she says.
She bends over a teenage girl dressed only in a red knit sweater, a shrapnel wound on the back of her leg reeking of gangrene. Her name is Faida, her eyes are empty, waterless like the rest of her body, and Isabel can not find a vein to insert the intravenous tube that could save her. "The blood vessels close down as they are dying," she explains, failing to find a vein on one arm and trying the other. The girl resists: "Leave me alone." Isabel withdraws. "This one wants to die," she says, and the wound will kill her anyway.
/ The worst part of the triage is knowing that most of the sick never make it close enough to the medical tents to stand a chance. The refugees of Rwanda's civil war stretch for miles in every direction, building what are fast becoming death camps. The old, the young and the weak drop where they are. "You have to choose," says the young nurse, turning away from an older man crying out for help. There are always more voices, pleading with her, pulling at her legs. "You can't get to everybody."
Until last week, the world did not get to everybody either. It certainly did not get to Rwanda, a country so infected by tribal hate and civil war that it seemed beyond saving. Three months of fighting between followers of the majority Hutu government and the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F.) left at least 500,000 dead. Most of the victims were Tutsi civilians slaughtered by Hutu militiamen. Of those who survived the genocide, at least 2.2 million have fled the country, including a million Hutu refugees who pushed northwest into the Zaire town of Goma in just five days last week. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of earlier refugees, Hutu and Tutsi alike, languish in camps across the eastern border in Tanzania and across the southern border in Burundi. If the exodus continues, half the country's population of 7.5 million will soon have died or dispersed.
That finally propelled President Clinton to action. Since the beginning of April the U.S. has contributed just over $150 million in aid to Rwanda but stoutly resisted leading a full-scale relief effort. On Friday Clinton ordered a round-the-clock airlift of food, water and medicine and dispatched the first of what could soon be up to 4,000 soldiers to distribute it throughout the border regions. The President was moved, he said, by the reports that Rwandans in the camps were dying at the rate of one a minute. "In the days to come," said the President, "as Americans see this heartbreaking, unfolding tragedy, the suffering must not only touch our hearts, it must move us as a nation to take the practical actions that this crisis demands."