(3 of 7)
The Munigi camp is about six miles up the road from Goma. Two relief workers lift a girl in a pretty turquoise dress and feel her neck for a pulse. Finding none, they carry her over to the pile of corpses, which they will douse in chlorine to disinfect them. But as they put her down, her head turns. Quickly they take her back to the tent where they are treating victims, but do not bother to set up an IV. She is too sick to save, the workers explained. "But she's moving," says one, "so you can't just leave her with the dead."
A woman at the camp gave birth four weeks prematurely. Early the next morning the mother seemed alert as a nurse set up a drip to treat her cholera; but she continued to bleed, and died before noon. Her husband arose and left, and the baby, still caked with blood, was left alone on the mat. "Without breast-feeding she is going to die," said one relief worker, swaddling the baby in a cloth wrap and leaving her in a cardboard box in the corner of a tent.
The hunger and the sickness conspire to kill as many as possible, but the hate still works as well. Hutu continue to attack Tutsi in the Goma camps. These bodies are different -- not passive, wasting corpses, but twisted wrecks of crushed skulls and flaking blood. A Tutsi woman is accused of brewing poison tea and giving it to 60 Rwandan soldiers, killing them all. She is beaten to death. One group of Hutu fall upon a Tutsi man along the road to the airport, beat him senseless, then lay him on his stomach and stomp on his spine until it snaps. No one bothers to cover his body. There is no time to count the dead, much less bury all of them.
Everywhere are the children, alone and terrified. At a camp west of Goma, Adrien Ntahobari, 12, sits with his niece Florinne, 6. They sob together. "I lost my mother. I don't know where she is," says the boy. The day before, the children had wandered for hours through the vast crowds looking for her in vain. They returned at nightfall to sleep in the open, curled up together in - Adrien's oversize sweater. "I am hungry and my head is hurting," he says, wiping flies from his swollen eyes. Neither child has eaten in two days, and Adrien is running a high fever, probably from malaria.
At the Ndosho orphanage nine miles outside of Goma, they hang onto the clothes of any adult in sight, and when night falls and the air grows cold, they cry for their mothers. "You hold them and they don't want to let you go," says Julienne Mukeba, 24, a law student from Kinshasa who is volunteering at the camp. They arrive by the hundreds, some orphaned, some wrenched from their parents during the crush at the border crossing, some abandoned by the starving. Many are too young to tell their stories; the staff make up names. And many don't last long. "Our morgue is filled with babies," said Dr. Nimet Lalani. "We've lost them all."
Sylvestre Gasigwa, 14, lost both parents and three brothers in last week's rush. Tears run down his face as he clutches a bloody wound on the crown of his head, where another child had struck him with a rock in a fight over food. "The food is not enough," he says. "I want to go home." And still there is no safety. Early last week relief workers spotted a Hutu soldier going from tent to tent with a grenade in his hand, looking for Tutsi children to kill.