A crowd of refugees from Burundi gathered around a small boy who said his parents were dead and that he had nothing to eat.
"I want to die," said the orphan, who refused to get up from the roadside in Gitezi camp where he had slumped in despair.United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) officials say that up to 112 people a day are dying of hunger and disease in Rwanda's 21 camps, where up to 375,000 refugees have fled to escape ethnic strife in Burundi.
Some 150,000 refugees have streamed into neighboring Tanzania and Zaire, where they also live in squalid conditions.
Relief officials say that the worst humanitarian crisis the troubled continent of Africa has suffered since Somalia's famine in 1992 is now looming around the refugee-flooded borders of Burundi.
Tribal violence has sputtered on since late October, when renegade soldiers from the minority Tutsi tribe murdered Hutu president Melchior Nadadaye in a bid for power that quickly failed.
Gitezi was a hillside forest two months ago. Now it is a city of filthy hovels where 20,000 people are clustered in shelters built out of banana leaves and plastic sheeting.
"In the beginning there were no flies. Now it's full of them," said aid worker Matthew Simons.
A makeshift Belgian Red Cross clinic treats up to 500 sick people a day, but nearby a team of refugees are employed to bury those too weak to withstand the ravages of dysentery or malaria.
Another 40 refugees are employed to bury the feces that cover the hillside where there are no latrines - but the stench and the filthy water that courses off the slopes after a downpour of rain indicates how unhealthy the camp has become.
Swiss relief workers say that about 70 percent of the deaths are caused by dysentery due to the filthy conditions in the camps.
In one camp, an outbreak of cholera has been reported, raising fears that an epidemic could sweep through the weak and hungry and carry hundreds off to their deaths.
Many of the refugees are wounded, most of them by gaping machete and spear wounds suffered in the primitive feuding between peasants.