In Katale Camp, Dirt, Disease and Despair

Morning arrives swiftly in equatorial Africa. There is hardly a sunrise before a gray-white glow illuminates the sky like a dirty fluorescent bulb.

But the sky itself is barely visible.

Right now, Zairian farmers are burning brush lands so the grass will grow green in the coming rainy season. Not far from the highway, the flat-topped volcano Nyiragongo spews its gases. Powdery dust rises with every relief convoy, every footstep. And, of course, green-sapling smoke coils from hundreds of thousands of morning campfires.

The air has substance to it, and grit, a pallor of poison on these lowlands, where squeezed together is one of the greatest and swiftest-moving concentrations of refugees the world has known. Their flight now halted, they swarm over this corner of impoverished Zaire, most of them herded into a few epic camps radiating out of the dingy town of Goma.

Katale is one such camp, with forbidding ground on which perhaps 250,000 Rwandan refugees huddle. Some estimates put the number at 400,000; others say 200,000. Other camps clustered here push the total of despair to 1 million, more or less. A plane flew overhead Saturday and tried to make a count: 900,000 total.

“Our life is horrible and it is getting worse,” says Idephouse Bagamuayese, a 28-year-old ethnic Hutu who has claimed his puny yardage on a high spot. At one time, one can imagine his face was fierce and proud. Now it is just sweaty, his eyes rimmed with pus. Here, one is 40 miles from Goma, 40 miles and 500 yards from Rwanda. One is in the midst of mass murderers and mass victims alike. Last month, many among these mostly Hutu refugees were hysterical killers hacking up rival ethnic Tutsis with machetes. Today, they are docile, dirty, defeated, diseased and dying.

In the camp’s morning light, a stranger’s eyes sting. But that is nothing compared to the smell. The world has seen the pictures, but what can pictures tell of the stench that brews from multitudes of unwashed people compressed in the tropics along with putrefying corpses, ponds of raw excrement and urine, endless spreading pestilence, dirt and fear? These are malodors absorbed like grease into the skin, and no one gets used to them.

To enter such a camp is to enter a world of suffering. One must step over the reclining to talk to the standing. And the standing are swept along by the moving. The dying get little sympathy. The dead are obstacles.

There are running sores, running noses and a communal wet coughing in the air. Disease is spread by close contact, doctors warn. Disease is spread by filthy conditions. And Katale camp is nourishing microbiology’s worst.

Cholera is declining but still prevalent. Shigella dysentery is spreading. Just this weekend, pneumonia began a furious strike on the weak of the camp, especially the children. Measles and meningitis are creeping into the huts. That old killer malaria is taking its toll, with more to come in the impending rainy season.

And at the French-operated hospital in Goma, one-third of the patients test positive for the virus that causes AIDS--or, more to the point here, that weakens the immune system against other assaults.

Bagamuayese is trying to make a life for himself in the squalor. He is selling banana beer from a six-gallon plastic fuel can, dirty and yellow. For 30 cents, he will fill a castoff quart bottle with the fast-fermented brew. His future is vested in his collection of eight scratched bottles, eight bamboo straws and a 5-by-8-foot thatched shack barely tall enough to squat in.

“Life, I tell you, is very difficult,” he says. “But I can do nothing about that.”

Bagamuayese used to build houses in Byumba in northern Rwanda. He carried his beer bottles more than 100 miles. He was robbed once on the long march. No, camp life is not settling down. “Nothing here can be normal.”

Enter the hovel of Alexander Tulikumana, a former machinist in a Kigali tool factory.

“I’m sorry I have no chairs,” he says.

He lives with three others in a 10-by-10-foot hut, framed by saplings and covered with wrinkled black plastic sheeting. The floor is a powdery volcanic flour, but Tulikumana is a rich man here--he has a nice tropical shirt and a small portable radio, three pots and a basket. And shoes.

His tent is spaced 18 inches from tents on three sides, with four feet extra in front for cooking. The camp goes on like this, tent after hut after blanket, 18 inches apart, over one hill, and another, on and on in every direction as far as the eye can see.

“My wife was a Tutsi. She was killed. My two children, killed. . . . No, I don’t know who did it,” Tulikumana says. “I’ll stay here until we are assured it is safe to go back. . . . Maybe two years, if I have to. What else can I do? . . . The future is in forgetting all that happened. If there is a future.”

According to relief workers, camps like Katale are tightly organized even though the scene appears wild and chaotic. People are encamped by prefecture, just as they lived in Rwanda. Village politicians and the murderous militia who ran Rwanda now run affairs here. They distribute the food; they watch over interviews to maintain the party line: Don’t go home; you will have your eyes taken out by the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front that now controls the country; we refugees will never go home until our old Hutu-dominated government tells us to; the nations of the West must force negotiations between the old and new governments.

“I listen to my radio for good news,” Tulikumana says.

Has there been any?

“No.”

This is high-altitude country. Not far away are the jungle mountains that provide the last habitat for the mountain gorilla. Katale camp, like the others, was scraped and trampled out of coarse volcanic lava flows, only yards from the boundary of Virunga National Park, home to elephants and other wildlife. On this morning, a group of baboons crosses the road outside the camp, snarling and baring their fangs.

The property that is not parkland is cultivated with banana and coffee plantations, with scattered groves of vine-draped trees. People who venture out of the camps wisely beat the path in front of them to ward off snakes.

In the outlying forest, the temperature may be 75 degrees. But in the caldron of Katale it is 15 degrees hotter. And inside Tulikumana’s plastic sweat house, it is easily over 100 degrees.

He wishes to explain the war that brought him here. His Hutu president died in a still-mysterious airplane crash April 6. “He told the Hutus not to kill the Tutsi and to make it a country for all. But he was betrayed. They killed him,” he says. “Then, the Hutus got angry.”

Angry enough for the Hutus to slaughter up to half a million of their countrymen. But their army was outmaneuvered and outgunned in a short, sharp revolution, and 2.2 million fled, half here to the vicinity of Goma. And now, perhaps 25,000 have died from disease, 700 to 900 more each day. And reconciliation seems laughably implausible.

Rwandans fled with what little money they had and what possessions they could carry. So Katale has now become a primitive bazaar.

A shoe repairman works with a needle and dental floss on the paper-thin sole of a sandal. One boy displays his wares: a single D-cell battery and a water-stained pack of cigarettes. On a rag, a woman offers six potatoes as a deathly ill man lies at her side. One man is selling four pairs of shoes and two mismatched singles. A piece of paper is lashed to a stick and says “Radio,” the only advertisement that could be seen over the hundreds of acres. But the radio repairman is nowhere to be seen. “Maybe he died,” says an impassive teen-ager.

Much has been reported about the dead in this horrible scene, perhaps so much as to numb the senses.

But they will not go away. On this morning, fresh batches line the road at Katale--six here all wrapped in mats, four a little farther on, some naked. A dozen more a little farther still.

Young men ride in blue trucks to collect the bodies. But two hours after the morning collection, a fresh row of corpses appears.

A man steps over a body to get his hair cut by a woman who has opened a barber stand with a bucket and a 10-inch pair of shears. A woman in a colorful but darkly soiled African wrap lays down a small child encased in dirty cloth, and shuffles away. A man emerges from the sea of people and leaves a corpse--maybe his mother, maybe his wife. He blends back into the throng with no more visible emotion than he would dropping off a pail of water.

But emotions are building in the camp.

Over the weekend, aid workers began carrying walkie-talkies. They travel in teams and check in according to fixed schedules. None has reported attacks from refugees, but they say they are concerned. The weakest of the refugees have died. The strong survive.

Here and there, journalists, particularly American journalists, encounter angry men who shout and chase them away. Many in these camps have been told by Hutu leaders that Americans are supporting the Tutsis, as the Europeans did throughout this part of Africa for many years.

There are no police in this camp. Zairian soldiers roam the perimeters but do not venture deep inside. Frequently they rob refugees of what little they have. The United Nations calls them a source of disorder. Relief supplies are flowing into Goma by road and air at a furious pace, but distribution remains uneven. Some areas have plenty of water, but others require a hike of several miles.

Women do that hard work--balancing 45-pound cans for the sweaty daylong trip to get the water they hope will not kill them. They tear through the forests of young trees, cutting down acres in a day for firewood. Many of the forests are young here, because the volcano Nyiragongo buried the lowlands in lava just six years ago.

Cattle and goats are herded through the camp, among the most precious possessions of all. At midday, several are led to a bloody pit--the camp slaughterhouse, where they are butchered in the sun under a cloud of flies. Most of the pots, however, have no meat. They bubble with a watery gray gruel made of relief supplies.

The smell, the teeming crush, the sickness, the pawing children who want only attention, the long fast slide from civilization churn up a dizziness that no Dramamine can prevent. The impulse to flee climbs up the neck.

So a visitor climbs into a dirty car, engulfed by refugees. The driver screeches on the horn; he zigs and zags to avoid a pickup truck carrying perhaps 35 people. But the way is blocked by a pile of lava boulders.

From out of the crowd two skinny, barefoot boys in filthy rags dart forth. Together they lift the razor-sharp rocks from the car’s path and then instantly blend back into the crowd. Inexplicably, those in so much need of help still found help to give.