And still they come - a procession of dwarf-like, emaciated children, emerging from the hills and forests of northern Burundi, the "killing fields" of the country's civil war.
Much has improved since my last visit, three months ago, to the north-western provinces of Cibitoke and Bubanza. More aid workers are on the ground, providing urgently-needed health care and emergency food supplies. Round-the-clock feeding stations have been set up for the first time. The military situation has calmed and many families have returned to their farms.
And yet: "Every day, there are new cases, children in appalling condition, walking miles to reach help," says Mr Patrick Lavand'homme, local head of the British agency Children's Aid Direct.
At CAD's feeding station in Bubanza, the constant wail of malnourished babies, their faces shrivelled and hair turned white, tells its own story. Some children have been attending for weeks and their skin has recovered its youthful sheen. However, the new arrivals, their bodies pocked by sores and swellings, are as pitiful as a sick child can be.
Bit by bit, the authorities are allowing aid agencies push north and east into the mountain communes, drawing closer to isolated groups of people ravaged by the world's fiercest civil war. For five years, farming in this fertile region became an impossibility as rival armies pillaged, stole crops, put whole villages to flight or forced them into detention camps.
Up to 200,000 people are thought to have died in Burundi's civil war since 1993. Just how many more will die depends on how fast aid workers can get help to the starving and beleaguered children and adults now emerging from hiding.
The extent of the problem is apparent from a report just compiled by the Irish agency Concern. For their assessment, staff travelled along remote roads which for fear of rebel attacks or landmines haven't seen a car in five years - even the Red Cross pulled out of Burundi after three of its workers were killed in Cibitoke in 1996.
One in five children in the province is malnourished, twice the average for Africa, the report shows. Over 10 per cent are severely malnourished, a level field worker Ros O'Loughlin says is worse than in Sudan. The death rate is three times the African average.
Concern is establishing a network of up to 10 feeding centres in Cibitoke, as security improves. "We're finding the needs are overwhelming. We can only cope within the limits of our resources. For the moment, people are going to continue dying," she says.
The challenges faced by overworked nurses and nutritionists are complex. O'Loughlin says more than half her patients have malaria. This contributes to malnutrition, which in turn facilitates disease. "So if you suffer an epidemic of measles or cholera, it can spread like wildfire."
Before the civil war, Burundi was a model African country in health terms. As the foreign minister, Mr Luc Rukingama, points out, the vaccination rate among children was then over 80 per cent.
Today in Cibitoke - thanks to the civil war, a shortage of medicines and the effects of sanctions imposed on Burundi in 1996 - this figure has dropped to 7 per cent, the Concern survey found.
Overall, it estimates that 6,000 children in the province need the urgent 24-hour care provided in a therapeutic feeding centre. But getting experienced nurses, local or expatriate, to work in such a dangerous area is proving difficult.
But what happened to the starving child pictured (by Alan Betson) on the front page of The Irish Times in February? O'Loughlin believes she may have "defaulted", meaning that her mother failed to continue attending the clinic each week.
Not surprising, considering the instability in the region, the mother's need to look after other children, and the long distances she had to travel by foot. Or maybe the child just died.
In Bubanza, the response of a French agency, Action contre la Faim, has been to build the world's biggest therapeutic feeding centre, capable of handling up to 800 children. Like most of the humanitarian interventions in the area, this is funded by ECHO, the EU's humanitarian office.
Patrick Lavand'Homme says the proportion of severely malnourished children attending the supplementary feeding centre run by Children's Aid Direct has halved since I last visited in February. A high-nutrient diet has revived those children with kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency which leads to skin oedemas and listlessness.
It takes longer to recover from marasmus, a condition resulting from long-term lack of calories which puts old, wrinkled faces and white hair on young heads as well as making children permanently irritable.
Mr Rukingama says the sanctions imposed after the coup are bleeding his country dry, and aid workers agree. "It is the poor who suffer when we cannot get medicine or seeds. Sanctions are immoral and unfair. They are responsible for the death of many people," he says.
Inflation has risen to 40 per cent, and imports and exports have collapsed since sanctions were introduced two years ago. Yet a small number of profiteers, some of them hardliners in the ruling elite, have made fortunes from breaking the embargo.
Burundi's food crisis has been made even worse by the destruction caused to the traditional supply routes through Tanzania by heavy rains linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon.
Since road and rail-lines were washed away earlier this year, the World Food Programme, the UN's food aid arm, has been desperately seeking alternative supply routes.
So far this year, Burundi has received less than half the emergency food it needs, the WFP says. As a result, the organisation has just started an airlift of food to the airport in Bujumbura.
Meanwhile, in the hills, people are starving. But if they get help quickly enough, and if the soldiers keep away, there is hope.
"Everything depends on access to land. If they can start to cultivate the fields and grow their own food again, there will be no need for us," says Mr Lavand'Homme.
More than 500 peolple were arrested yesterday in the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, in a security sweep against rebelsand illegal immigrants, AFP reports.
Witnesses said the security forces were looking for Burundi rebels as well as Rwandan and Congolese people who were in the country illegally.