Two hundred and fifty thousand Burundians have fled their country, mostly to Zaire, joining the more than million and a half Rwandan refugees already in the camps. UN and Zaire authorities have made repeated attempts to close down the Rwandan refugee camps but with little success. Last month, this bus returned to Rwanda was almost empty, very few people taking the gamble to return home. For those who stay, there are meager food rations and rugged living conditions. Thousands of babies are born in the Rwandan refugee camps each month.
Aid workers attribute the birth explosion to different factors.
One of them is what the young mothers say in interviews, that the genocidal civil war decimated their numbers and that the dead children must be replaced. Now, we get the observations of a relief official recently in the area. Geraldine Sicola is now director of Catholic Relief Services' emergency coordination unit and traveled to Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire. From 1980 to '92, she was an aid worker in East Africa. Ms. Sicola, thank you for joining us.