Atosha winced as she recalled the 15 minutes she spent in the fast-flowing Rusizi River, which separates the Democratic Republic of the Congo from Burundi, on a Friday night in late February.
“I was terrified,” the 23-year-old said of her journey of about 130 metres, spent clinging to a makeshift float alongside a young man whom she had paid to take her to the Burundian side. “It was my first time crossing that river and I had no option.”
Her relief on reaching the riverbank quickly turned to anguish, however, when she learned that her younger sisters, aged 10 and 14, whom she had sent across first had been swept away by the current.
“I stood there and started crying,” said Atosha, one of tens of thousands of Congolese refugees sheltering in a stadium in Cibitoke province, a few miles from the border.
The refugees risking their lives to cross to Burundi are fleeing conflict in eastern DRC, where the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group has made swift advances since January in an escalation of a long-running conflict rooted in the spillover into DRC of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and the struggle for control of DRC’s vast mineral resources.
Atosha said that on 14 February, Congolese soldiers retreating from the city of Bukavu entered her home town in Bafuliiru Chiefdom to the south. Many were wounded and their arrival spread panic around the town.
According to Atosha, a solider who had lost an eye in the fighting told her: “If there’s a way for you to go to Burundi, do it today because the fighting is coming here tonight and it’s bad. People are getting killed and women and girls are being raped.”
As gunfire echoed around the town, Atosha’s family agonised over what to do. A few days later, her father told her to travel to the border, just a couple of miles to the east, with her sisters. Her parents would follow.
Atosha gathered the children, and they left without any belongings. “With gunshots ringing, you can’t even get the strength to pick up a pen,” she said.
They trekked as fast as they could, joining fleeing crowds – some using bicycles – until they reached the Rusizi, where Atosha paid 20,000 Congolese francs (£5.40) to a group of young men to swim each family member to the other side.
More than 7,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands uprooted by the surge in violence in DRC in recent months. Sexual violence and human rights abuses are “rampant” near the frontlines, the UN has said, as is the looting and destruction of civilian homes and businesses.
At least 65,000 people have arrived in Burundi in the past month, the largest influx into the country in decades.
In Cibitoke , what used to be a bustling sports venue is now a key transit centre for the refugees as they await relocation to designated sites.
The new wave of refugees has further strained the humanitarian situation in Burundi, a country of 13 million that was already struggling to cope with handling Congolese refugees from previous conflicts, returnees from past Burundi crises, and its own people displaced internally due to climatic disasters.
“It’s an emergency that is underreported,” said Geoffrey Kirenga, the head of mission for Burundi at Save the Children, which is providing a humanitarian response in the stadium and elsewhere. “Now this influx has overwhelmed our existing capacity. It is very exhausting, but also underfunded.”
Amadou Ali, the Burundi country director for the International Rescue Committee, which is also providing humanitarian relief to people fleeing DRC, said: “As a human, if you see that situation, all you can do is to provide support. It can be material support, it can be moral support, it can be financial support, but its contribution today is very important.”
The stadium was a hive of activity when the Guardian visited earlier this month. Densely packed crowds joined long queues to register as a refugee or fetch water from a truck, jerrycans in hand. In one area, Red Cross officials called out names through loudspeakers and handed out essentials – a blanket, a bucket, a mat, soap and a mosquito net for each person. Many in the stadium had survived weeks without them.
Despite the best efforts of aid agencies, the tired and often traumatised people who made it to the stadium found a shelter in distress.
Many said food distribution happened once a day, and was not sufficient.
“People are suffering here,” Atosha said. “Being a refugee or being called a refugee isn’t something you can be proud of.”
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She added: “We ask our leaders and our president to find a way to sit down and resolve this conflict. It’s so sad that people are dying, others are disappearing, and families are being separated.”
Many of those in the stadium had lost loved ones to the deadly currents of the Rusizi, or were otherwise separated at some point on their journey to Burundi.
Therese*, 46, paid a man to move her two children, aged 12 and 14, across the river weeks ago. “He asked me to let him take the children first then he’d come for me,” she said. “I didn’t see him again.”
Therese, who crossed herself with the aid of another man, said: “I cried. Other transporters told me I’d find my children on the Burundian side, but I didn’t.”
Emmanuel*, 15, is one of hundreds of unaccompanied children who have arrived in Burundi. He was separated from his family amid the chaos that ensued when gunshots started echoing in his home town in Ngweshe Chiefdom, south of Bukavu.
His family ran towards the hills in eastern DRC, while he went in the direction of Burundi. “We don’t know whether they’re dead or alive. We heard the fighters bombed the hills,” he said.
He and his friends walked for two days. On the way, they slept in a forest at night, got robbed, saw dead bodies, and women giving birth along the road.
Others were able to get to Burundi with their entire families. Safari fled Ngweshe Chiefdom with one child on his shoulder and food on his head, while his wife carried one child on her back and another at the front, and clothes on her head. They walked for two hours to cross the river. “When I saw my entire family cross, I saw that God had helped me, and our hearts became at ease,” Safari said.
Some of the refugees in the stadium are volunteering for tasks to help each other, including cooking and chopping firewood.
In one shelter, Safari, a former teacher who is being supported by the IRC in Burundi, was showing children how to write, inscribing the letter “o” using chalk on a small blackboard for a handful of enthusiastic children who then did as he had taught them.
In another, Atosha, who completed her degree a few months ago, rocked a crying toddler on her thigh. She was surrounded by more than a dozen other children gazing down at colourful wooden number puzzles.
She picked up scattered pieces on the mat and stretched her hand to distribute them to some children. “Put this here,” she said, guiding one of them.
She was taking care of children and keeping them busy with the number puzzle as their parents scrambled to register as refugees and look for food and other essentials.
“We’re all brothers and sisters here,” she said. “Some people here have given up hope and have been crying every day because they lost their family members. If you have strength to encourage somebody even though you have your own struggles, you should do it.”
*Names changed for safety reasons.
