Word: goma
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
Even if the doctors manage to treat the diseases, survivors need to be fed and sheltered. Goma alone requires 600 metric tons of food a day, 1 million blankets, 200,000 rolls of plastic sheeting, 200,000 jerricans, 80 water tankers and 90 to 100 trucks to carry food the 497 miles from the Ugandan capital of Entebbe -- and these numbers are sure to grow. When the Red Cross began its food distribution, a child was trampled when the crowd, desperate that there would not be enough to go around, surged forward. "If it runs out, or if it doesn...