GOMA, Zaire -- With smiles of bewildered gratitude, refugee women and children handed over their jerry cans and buckets to U.S. troops. One after another the containers came back, brimming with a gift of life: fresh, clean water.


U.S. Army engineers helped by volunteers pumped the water Thursday through an 800 meter hose up a slope from their water-treatment planton Kivu, a lake contaminated with corpses and human wastes.


"This is the day all our soldier and civilian members of the task force have been looking forward to," said Major Eric Hanson, supervising the water project.


Germany, Holland and Britain announced Thursday they were rushing medics, water-purification plants, engineers and a field hospital to the region.


With U.S. troops doling out water on site, UN trucks hauled hundreds of thousands of liters Thursday to refugees farther off in camps where pestilence, mostly cholera, has killed 20,000 Rwandans in the last week.


Most died because they had no water to overcome the bacteria's dehydrating effect. French troops using earth-moving equipment have been working feverishly to bury the dead.


Trying to contain the epidemic, the United Nations accelerated efforts Thursday to clear this beleaguered border town of refugees.


Zairian soldiers ordered refugees to walk to three areas where they were trucked to camps outside Goma, which is bloated with thousands of homeless people and hundreds of unburied bodies.


There, numerous aid agencies have been struggling to supply more than a million Rwandan refugees with water, food and medical care since the refugee crisis began in mid-July.


Aid officials say defeating the cholera epidemic and other diseases will require a supply of millions of liters of sanitary water.


U.S. efforts to provide some of that water got off to a bad start Wednesday.


The only two beat-up UN trucks on offer delivered 30,500 liters of water to Kibumba refugee camp, about 35 kilometers north of Goma, where about 300,000 people have congregated.


By Thursday, UN officials had rounded up a half-dozen or more properly equipped tankers that delivered water to Kibumba, though one crashed on the way back to Goma.


A team of 18 U.S. Air Force specialists arrived at Goma's chaotic airport early Thursday. Their task is to improve the unloading of aid planes, organization of plane parking and goods storage, and air-traffic control -- without stepping on the toes of Zairian, French and UN personnel already sharing those responsibilities.


U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry was expected to arrive in Goma this weekend. He will survey America's regional efforts to relieve the refugee crisis wrought by Rwanda's bloodletting.


Ethnic Hutu militias backed by the former Hutu government have been blamed for the slaughter of up to 500,000 civilians, mostly minority Tutsis.


Civil war in the central African country resumed in April when Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was killed in a suspicious plane crash. Tutsi-led rebels drove the Hutu army and militias out of Rwanda but an estimated 1.2 million people fled with them, influenced by Hutu government propaganda that the Tutsis would exterminate them.