REPORTERS’S NOTEBOOK : As Rwanda War Rages, It Reverberates Throughout Region

Six weeks after this empty valley became home to 300,000 Rwandan refugees, Benaco is taking on the trappings of permanency. It is now part of Africa’s life cycle, with births and natural deaths, roadside merchants selling everything from batteries to potatoes and practitioners who treat the ill with herbs and chants.

The wealthier people here have radios, and news from the war front in Rwanda spreads quickly from tent to tent, where families hunker outside to cook their maize rations over campfires of gathered sticks. The survivors of entire villages moved across the border as cohesive entities and now dwell here clustered together, their social structures intact.

A young man who calls himself Johnny sat alone by a fire the other night, looking across the hills toward Rwanda. He was the oldest of eight children and had been a university student. A passerby asked him how he felt being part of this great sea of displaced people.

“Sad,” he said in English. “Not angry, not afraid, not -- how do you call it? -- confused. Just sad.”

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Annie Faure, a French doctor, has been ministering to the wounded at Gahini Hospital in northern Rwanda since May 1. Her patients include 100 war orphans, and she is at a loss to explain why the Rwandans at the hospital--including nurses and healing mothers--ignore the orphans, even refusing to feed them unless she is there to check.

“They need love, particularly after the trauma they have suffered,” the doctor said.

So one afternoon last week she took the orphans, who were well enough to walk, to her nearby home.

She sat them in a big circle in the garden and gave them cookies and told them stories with, she said, happy endings.

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Young con artists in Nairobi, Kenya, have for years used a favorite trick: They introduce themselves to Americans on the street and say they will be studying at USC or UCLA in the fall. Does the American have time for coffee to talk about what university life in the United States will be like?

Wary Americans know the encounters are always pitches for money.

One young man who said his name is Peter wasn’t making any headway with an American visitor the other day, despite an elaborate story about growing up in Kenya’s highlands with a dozen brothers and sisters and studying nights to earn his scholarship at USC.

“What if I tell you I am a Rwandan refugee?” he said. “Then will you buy me a meal?”

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Along the Uganda side of Lake Victoria, between the villages of Kasensero and Lambu, the bodies of thousands of Rwandan massacre victims have washed ashore in the last two weeks. Ugandan health officials have expressed concern that the rotting corpses may have contaminated the lake and its fish.

But fisherman Philip Anguma does not share the concern. He was pulling in his catch of Nile perch, 100 yards from where rescue teams were plucking half a dozen decomposed bodies from the lake. He wrapped his fish in banana leaves and sent them off to market in Masaka lashed to the back of his friend’s bicycle.

Anguma explained: “Of course the lake is safe. I have fished here for years. My father fished here too, and he lived to be an old man.”

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John Barayagwiza came to bury his infant son in the mist of early morning.

He stood on a small plateau above the Benaco camp, surrounded by 20 men from his village, and they talked loudly about the war. The child’s body was wrapped in dark plastic provided by the United Nations and lay unattended nearby in the brush. Several men labored with hoes and pickaxes to dig a grave in the hard earth.

Soon a lay priest came, turning off the dirt road at a sign that said irimbi --cemetery. Then came the body of another child, a week-old girl whose mother had died giving birth. And then the covered body of an adult woman, borne by four men on a makeshift stretcher. She had died of AIDS, one of the stretcher bearers said.

Barayagwiza, a farmer, said it was strange his son should escape the killing in Rwanda, only to die here where it was safe.

The service lasted only a few minutes. Then the farmer walked back over the hill to gather his remaining seven children and begin the long daily trek in search of firewood that would sustain his family.