xGOMA, Zaire -- One camp is in a sports center, the other in a rocky field. Each is swamped with sick and dying Rwandans. And both have finally received desperately needed medical help from the outside world.


There the similarities end.


The Goma Cercle Sportif houses 2,400 sick and wounded soldiers, officers and political agents of the former Rwandan army, a force accused of widespread atrocities as they fought and lost a civil war to prop up a murderous regime.


Down the road, the S.O.S. Orphanage houses nearly 4,000 Rwandan children whose parents were killed or have disappeared. From 6 months to 10 years old, the lonely children are among the saddest victims of the war.


Indeed, it is a measure of the chaos and misery here that the United Nations children's fund rushed an 11-member anti-cholera team and four tons of supplies to the orphanage from a country better known for receiving emergency aid than sending it: Somalia.


Thanks to round-the-clock relief flights and a growing lifeline of truck convoys, critical supplies of food, medicine and other emergency goods have at last started pouring into Goma, hub of the global effort to aid an estimated 1.2 million Rwandans who flooded across the border almost two weeks ago.


Thousands of Zairians, even prisoners in the city jail, have been stricken by the still-raging cholera epidemic that is now killing an estimated 1,800 refugees a day. Goma is considered the center of the epidemic.


Other humanitarian aid goes to a little-known walled camp specifically set up for thousands of ethnic Tutsis who fled Rwanda before the current crisis. They are kept separate from the other refugees for understandable reasons.


Up to half a million civilians, mostly Tutsis, were butchered by the majority Hutu army and civilian militias after the country's Hutu president died April 6 in a still-unexplained plane crash. But when the Hutu army was routed by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Hutu population and their leaders fled in fear.


Now members of the exiled government and militia are regrouping in the refugee camps.