In Geti, 16km east of Aveba, hundreds of people arrive each day, searching for food and safety. The Kanoya family, some two dozen people, sat beneath a banana tree waiting for Tchoni Mugero, its patriarch, to build a makeshift shelter out of grass and sticks. It had taken three days for the family to gather enough materials to build a house, and in the meantime they had been sleeping outside.
"We have never suffered like this," said Djimo Charles Kanoya, a member of the family."We spent one month in the bush. The children are hungry and they are so cold."
Even more than food, the people need blankets and plastic tarpaulins to shelter them from the cold mountain air at night.
At the hospital in Geti, Ngele Anyodi, a nurse, said children were dying of disease and malnutrition every day because they could not get to a better-equipped hospital.
"This place was looted in the fighting, " he explained, showing the ransacked offices, laboratory and pharmacy, stripped clean of microscopes, medicines and medical equipment. "We cannot care for the sickest people here. We don't have the means."
Indeed, the nurse in charge -- there are no doctors here -- was also a patient, sick with malaria.
An election may be around the corner, but voting, he said, was the last thing from his mind. Dead people, he said, cannot vote.
"We need help," Anyodi pleaded. "We need to survive first."
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