A child lies dying next to his mother at a hospital caught in the cross-fire of Rwanda's civil war.
Miles away, on a flower-covered hilltop, children who have escaped the guns that orphaned them play in the sunshine.The two scenes - one a shell-blasted hospital in the capital, the other an orphanage in the countryside - illustrate the uneven spread of pain brought by months of ethnic slaughter in this central African country.
At least 200,000 Rwandans, mainly civilians of the Tutsi ethnic group and Hutu sympathizers, have been killed in Rwanda since April. Subsequent fighting between Tutsi rebels and the Hutu-dominated government has devastated the country.
In Kigali, the capital, bullet-pocked cars, twisted street lights and shattered glass litter the roads. Baby-faced soldiers with AK-47s man roadblocks made of plastic milk crates. Shells thunder into trees, houses and a church sheltering refugees.
When the mortars fall silent, civilians creep from their shelters in search of war rations, bags of flour carried on their heads and jerry cans of water hauled home from a dirty river.
At the Red Cross hospital, a frail boy with a bloodstained bandage around his head lies on a stretcher. At his side is his mother, wounded by shrapnel from the same mortar shell.
The mother may live but the boy will die, said Dr. John Sundin, a Red Cross surgeon from New Haven, Conn. The hospital, hit several times by rebel shells, handles a hundred casualties a day. About half are patched up in a dirt driveway and sent home, the rest admitted for treatment. About five of those admitted die each day.
It was a typical day, Sundin noted: three amputations, three damaged eyes removed, three abdominal surgeries and too many small repairs to count.
"I don't think it can get any worse than this," he said. "We're between enemy lines. The front is coming in and going out."
A world away is the Ndera orphanage, a few miles east of Kigali. Beyond its brown brick walls is a bucolic village surrounded by grazing long-horned cattle and fertile fields.
The orphanage's two buildings and dirt yards are filled with 284 children, most Tutsis whose parents were killed in massacres that began after Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana died in a suspicious plane crash April 6.