It looks as though she is holding nothing at all, then she briefly unwraps a fold of bright cloth at her chest and there is a tiny, wizened baby. Two-month-old Serugendo is Adile Mgyanabo’s first child and was born healthy but is now just 2kg, less than he weighed at birth.
She looks confused and shakes her head when asked about her baby. No, she says, it’s not malnutrition, ”c’est la guerre”.
In a small charity-run clinic at Kanjaruchinga, on the outskirts of Goma, nutritionist Luc Butungana has opened up a second room to cope with the influx of starved children, the war’s mostly hidden, innocent victims.
He has a pen-drawn, week-by-week caseload graph on his office wall, but the numbers arriving over the past few weeks have taken the line up and off the chart. The count is 167 for November so far and still rising. ”All these cases here are from the war,” said Butungana ”We can save most of these babies, but this is a very tiny proportion we see here, because people don’t know how to find us or are afraid.
”People do not know there is help, and so their children will die. Many will be dying now. It takes only two or three weeks for a healthy child to deteriorate in the bush. Their immunity is fragile: malaria and acute respiratory illness, malnutrition, and then this child cannot last long.”
Adile Mgyanabo was hoeing weeds in the field, Serugendo strapped to her back, when gunfire exploded around her and she joined the villagers’ flight into the bush, losing her husband in the panic. She walked 50km south to a refugee camp outside Goma and was sent here. Serugendo may well survive.
It is four weeks since the latest resurgence of military action began in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 12-year-old war. Government troops fought rebel forces led by Laurent Nkunda, who in turn also fought the Mai Mai and the Rwandan Hutu extremist militias.
It is three weeks since fierce fighting erupted around Rutshuru, as the rebels moved to capture the town, sending people running for their lives, abandoning their homes to hide in the bush as bullets flew and bodies fell.
But even as efforts to broker peace in the DRC were continuing on Saturday, most families who had scattered far from their homes were still not daring to go back. The UN estimates that 250 000 people have been displaced. Those refugees are in fear of their lives, but for some the fear for their sick children is greater and is bringing them out to seek medical help wherever they can.
Next to Adile is 30-year-old Francine Gahiga with Elia, aged four, and Sara, two. With her husband and other two children, they were in the bush for two weeks without food or water. The children are severely malnourished and Elia also has malaria.
”I came here because I was afraid for their lives,” said Gahiga, ”But when they are cured we will go back to join my husband hiding in the fields because we are afraid to go home too. There is no security.”
Butungana sighs heavily at this, but he knows the Gahiga family have no option. ”There is no reason for malnutrition in this country,” he says. ”We have food, Congo is very fertile, we grow plenty of food.” He sighs again and then walks off to his charts.
The international aid agencies are here in eastern DRC, but the Observer found many, many refugees in Goma and outside complaining of hunger and many children displaying the tell-tale lightened hair colour and distended stomachs of malnutrition. People who had been hiding in the bush talked of eating unripe bananas and drinking only dirty water. Cholera is on the rise.
Up in rebel-controlled territory, just north of Rutshuru, a health clinic supported by the international medical charity Merlin had plenty of beans on the boil in huge pots and a great pan of specially enriched baby milk. Gervais Kambale (45) is the nurse in charge. He says 77 new cases of babies with severe malnutrition arrived this morning. ”All are displaced persons who have just come out of the bush; it’s the insecurity, they are afraid,” he says.
The noise of babies crying is quite deafening as mothers and a few fathers with half-starved children sit on long wooden benches around an open-sided concrete room.
Jeanette Habimana was too scared to leave her house for five days when the fighting erupted, then she walked 30km to find help for her two-year-old, Ushindi, whose swollen feet and half-closed eyes make him look a very sick little boy.
Grinning despite being hardly able to move, Salomon Kabahiza is seven. His shoulders are knife-thin and his tummy like a football. Kambale is delighted with his progress. He arrived weighing 9,7kg and couldn’t stand up. His family recount how they have had to move around five different places over the past three weeks.
Kambale is impatient with the stories pouring out from around the room: ”Look around here, this may be the outcome of just a few weeks, and yes, it is worse than I have seen before, but really this is 12 years of war.
”Here we are only seeing a small number. Many are dying in the open or hiding in houses, too afraid to get here. These children will not die now, they will grow up, but they have developmental problems, slow motor skills.
‘It is insane to have malnutrition in Congo. People need to live in their houses and cultivate their fields.” – guardian.co.uk