A PREGNANT woman sat on the wet dirty ground. A few hours earlier a six month old baby died from dehydration caused by diarrhoea; 12 other people have just died. Many others are sick - the torrential tropical rain of the past 24 hours have made conditions appalling.
The Ngangi 2 camp, 2 km past Goma, provides the constant reminder that in every conflict people get caught in the crossfire. The people here have nothing to do with the Rwandan Hutu militias still slugging it out from their refugee camps, nor the Zairean rebels fighting against them. These are people just trying to survive. They don't even have the most basic materials provided by aid agencies during emergencies. There is no plastic sheeting, so the straw huts in which people sleep are soaked through. There are pools of water and mud everywhere. Children's clothes and blankets are wet, and in the humidity and rain of the region, will not dry.
There is no medicine. Sachets of dehydrated formula costing a few pence prevent death from diarrhoea induced dehydration, but there are none. The stench of latrines infects part of the camp.
The camp is on volcanic rock where nothing grows. They used to get some food from the local Caritas organisation, but this stopped when the fighting started three weeks ago. They are too far away from Goma town to have looted shops as many others did. And they have no money to buy food.
The strong get whatever food is going, the weak get weaker. Some of the children have the distended stomachs familiar in famine.
Unchlorinated water is sometimes delivered by local aid workers. A local priest sometimes brings water, and when there is none, people dig trenches and wait for rain. This water supply causes diarrhoea which results in dehydration and eventually death.
There are 186 families here. Last May, there were 362, who arrived from the north, fleeing fighting there. Some 176 families left when the recent fighting broke out in Goma.
I visited the camp yesterday with staff from Trocaire. Mr Hamuli Leon, a thin man with a large infected sore on his neck, explained the situation matter of factly without complaint.
An Italian priest, Father Francisco Zamfese, asked that aid agencies not forget the Zairean people of Goma in their attempts to assist the 1.2 million Rwandan Hutu refugees in the region. In a meeting yesterday with Trocaire staff in his office in the centre of Goma, where he has spent 25 years, he complained about the attitude of the West.
"Always in Africa they see the political crisis coming, they see the war starting and they do nothing. They never try to find political solutions in Africa. They wait and wait and then act when people are dying."
Standing in Ngangi camp, Ms Mary Sweeney of Trocaire, said she was angry. "When I hear of people dying from diarrhoea I get angry. People should not die of diarrhoea. It is cured so easily. It is not right. What kind of human beings are we?"