If we were at home, I could look for medicine. Further aggravating the situation is Congo's economy, the world's fastest-shrinking since the war began. The main killer is people who don't have enough money in their pocket so they can take their kid to the clinic in time. Even so, IRC estimated that 200,000 of the first 1.7 million deaths were by violence, almost all of them civilians. Even as a cease-fire has held on the front lines, massacres have continued behind rebel lines where militias and rebel armies terrorize some of Congo's more densely populated districts, attacking villages on the suspicion inhabitants are helping the other side.
Some groups are simply homicidal.
The men with wild hair and bushy beards who kicked in the door of Jean Pierre Mushobozi's hut in the village of Buguli one night in November were Hutu extremists from Rwanda, who are associated with the group that carried out the 1994 genocide that killed more than a half-million Rwandan Tutsis and are now fighting for the Congolese government. Congo's vast jungles are now populated by untold thousands who no longer feel safe in their homes but are ill equipped for living in the bush. You don't really see them. You don't see the bodies. World Food Program workers in South Kivu are returning from newly accessible villages with reports of more malnourished adults than children.