GOMA, Zaire - They sit alone in the refugee camps, staring straight ahead. None of them smile, few cry and some just shake uncontrollably with fright.
Nobody knows their names, their ages, or most important, where their parents are.
"They are helpless in every aspect of life," says UNICEF worker Hassan Egal, 34. "Maybe it would have been best if they had never been born."
They are Rwanda's 200,000 children separated from their parents, who were victims of the brutal war or of diseases after escaping to teeming camps here.
About 2.4 million refugees, mostly of the majority Hutu clan, fled their native Rwanda to Zaire after the minority Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of the country. At least 500,000 people were killed in the war, most slaughtered by Hutu militia before they were routed.
Aid workers find children wandering alone screaming "mama." Or crying themselves to sleep atop the volcanic rocks. Or clutching onto the pants leg of anyone who passes.
No one wants these children. At times, it seems no one even cares. Aid workers sit the children in tents alongside the road hoping refugees will recognize them or simply take them into their families. It hasn't happened.
"I haven't any friends," says 6-year-old Jean, trying to hold back tears. "I've lost my mama. My papa was killed."
Next to him is 5-year-old Beatrice and her 4-year-old sister Sebahimzi, who lost their mother to cholera two days earlier in the camp. Beatrice cries when she describes what happened to her father. She turns her hand sideways and hits the back of her head several times. A nurse explains: Beatrice's father was macheted, and Beatrice barely escaped.
They are among 3,200 children at the SOS de Ndosho camp. Two doctors and six nurses try to help. "We just don't know what to do anymore, what will happen to them," says Dr. Phillip Leger Grenobel, 59, of the Doctors of the World aid group.
Still, medical staffs at the children's camps manage working 20 hours a day until some of them, too, collapse from exhaustion. But they're making big strides. Only four children die this day, down from 54 at the end of last week.
"We have to keep them alive, for God's sake," says UNICEF's Dr. Steffan de Miftura, a veteran of 24 years of relief work. "These children don't deserve to die after all they've been through."
Despite the number of orphans here, relief workers and government officials say none will be able to be adopted by the outside world, at least not for now.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and Save the Children will first have to determine whether there are extended family members willing to care for the kids. Rudy von Bernuth, of Save the Children, says workers are interviewing children and people who know them, taking photographs and building up a scrapbook to show parents.
Those who aren't adopted by the family members will become the responsibility of the newly formed Rwandan government or the Zairian government if they don't return home.
But the governments are in such disarray that it's likely to be years before any decisions are made.
Even so, aid officials say Western-style adoption may not be the best approach. "We cannot impose Western solutions," says Bob Koepp, 51, of Los Angeles, emergency operations coordinator of the aid group Lutheran World Federation. "We need to try and find their families because Africans have their own way of doing things."
In Washington, the State Department warns against hoping to adopt. "There's no legal way of someone coming in and adopting these children," says Gary Sheaffer of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs. "There has to be an entity there that can legitimately give a child up for adoption and that doesn't exist at this point."
U.S. law requires foreign adoptees to be documented orphans or legally abandoned by their parents, Sheaffer says.
Back at the orphanage, Spanish nuns are trying to give the children some love. They have named some Pepe, Paco, Maria, and tell them repeatedly in the Rwandan language of Kinyawanda: "You are so beautiful." Some of the children smile. Others are too weak to respond.
The nuns are dressing the orphans, both boys and girls, in brown and yellow table clothes sewed into "kitangas," or African dresses. Others have been given T-shirts - some reading "World Cup '94." One young boy is proudly walking around in a woman's khaki-colored Gap skirt.
"Today, thank God, no dead," whispers Sister Sabina Iragui, 48, of Pamplona, Spain, clasping her hands in prayer.
As she speaks, a small boy reaches out to a passing volunteer. He's among six orphans laid out in front of the cholera ward. All are beyond medical treatment.
The volunteer shakes her head and moves on, too busy helping those who have at least some chance to live. "We can't do anymore," Iragui says, "it's God's turn now." Two hours later the boy - called Francisco by the sisters - was dead.
At 4 p.m., the U.N. dump truck arrives to cart off the day's cholera-ridden corpses. About 200 orphans gather in what has become a daily ritual.
The children stand in silence, holding each other's hands for comfort as the bodies wrapped in blankets hit the truck with a loud "thump." Nuns bless the corpses. Aid workers look away.
Still, there are signs of hope here. A naked 5-year-old girl covered head to toe in human feces was brought to the orphanage last Friday. She said she hadn't eaten in eight days. By Saturday, she was smiling, but too weak to talk or even walk, doctors thought. Then to everyone's surprise, she slowly crawled out of her bed, and headed toward Miftura's side.
She stood up, tugged on his pants leg, gave him half of her daily food biscuit and wrapped her skeleton body around his.
"It was as if to say thank you," UNICEF's Miftura says, his voice beginning to crack. "I've never cried in 24 years," he says wiping his tears. "Today I cry."
He gathers himself together and says, in an air of desperation, "Food and medicine are important, but what's missing here is love. Nothing will replace that. We can never be their true families. Won't somebody help us, please?"
