UGANDA: The road through Pader District cuts ramrod straight through some of Uganda's most fertile farmland. Sunflowers turn their yellow faces skywards alongside eight-foot shoots of sorghum grass.
Yet the 33,000 people living in Pajule refugee camp would starve without a monthly delivery of food aid. They have become caught in the crossfire of an 18-year civil war - the world's forgotten humanitarian crisis and increasingly a battle for food in northern Uganda.
"Life here is terribly repressive," says Ms Helen Akello (35), who struggles to bring up her eight children in a one-room mud hut. "The children always seem to have a fever and the clinics charge too much. Money is just impossible to get now that we aren't allowed to work in the fields."
Big-bellied, thin-boned children standing behind her bear the signs of malnutrition. Not one smiles.
Until last spring a handful of groundnuts or potatoes from the locals' gardens was enough to supplement the basic aid rations or to raise cash to buy medicine. But then guerrillas of the Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, started raiding the gardens. Now no one is allowed to venture more than two kilometres from the government camp. Guards beat anyone found outside after dark.
If living outside risks capture by rebels, life inside brings other dangers. Malaria and HIV are rife; diarrhoea claims the life of a baby a day.
"The problem is that when you go to bury someone you find bodies already there," says local Mr Ben Akenna. "We end up burying bodies on top of each other."
In all, 144 villages have decamped to Pajule. Two years ago it was little more than a trading post and Christian mission. Now it is a sprawl of mud huts. The stench of sewage, sweat and suffering hangs in the air.
At first, international aid agencies moved in here, digging bore holes and dispensing medicine. Two years later, the threat of ambush means nothing can get in or out without a military escort.
The monthly food convoys - carrying 265 tonnes of maize, soya and vegetable oil - sent by the UN's World Food Programme can only move with protection from government soldiers crammed on the back of flatbed trucks. No one uses the roads after dark.
Similar camps house more than 1.8 million people forced from their homes by the war.
Kony's shadowy group has few defined aims but is notorious for targeting civilians, mutilating its victims and reinforcing its ranks by kidnapping tens of thousands of children. Women are used for carrying weapons and provisions, or kept as sex slaves.
United Nations and European Union officials recently tried to call attention to the crisis. Mr Jan Egeland, UN emergency relief co-ordinator, said the atrocities outstripped comparisons with Darfur, where about a million civilians are affected.
And last week the European Commission Humanitarian Office - the donor arm of the EU - announced it was increasing its budget 30-fold, to €12 million.
But the Ugandan government insists it is close to victory in its war against Kony's rebels. Last week a spokesman said 13 militants had been killed in two days and a further nine captured.
Such claims provoke hollow laughs in Pajule. Mr David Kidega speaks for many when he holds up his hands and gestures at ditches deep with mud. "We are really suffering a lot, and when they say they are winning the war we just don't believe them."
In a report earlier this year, the International Crisis Group concluded there were good reasons for President Yoweri Museveni's government not to seek a speedy resolution. The war brings international aid and provides an excuse for the southern government to keep troublesome northern tribes in confinement, it said.
Aid workers are as sceptical as camp residents of a swift end to the misery.
"It is very unpredictable," she says. "There is a lull, people relax - and then the LRA just comes back," says Ms Stella Oponya, who runs the WFP's activities in Pader.
As she speaks, thousands of people begin streaming away from the camp's blue-walled church. They had gathered to mark the first anniversary of Pajule's darkest day, when rebels swarmed through the camp in October 2003, overpowering the guards. They left with more than 1,200 civilians - each one a potential soldier or slave - and killed 45.
Thirteen-year-old Ojok Geoffrey emerged from the bush in July. "When I was first captured, I stayed in Uganda and was given food items to carry. Then we were taken to one of the bases in Sudan," he says.
"I was given a gun - a submachine gun - and sent back to Uganda to fight." He speaks with the spare delivery of someone trying to forget, and shudders as he recounts coming face to face with one of his victims.
"We caught a government soldier and he had a bayonet. We had to use it to cut his throat. I feel so bad now but we did it because we were forced to."
He was brainwashed into believing that escape would offer no sanctuary.
Kony himself - a former altar boy who now claims to be a prophet - lectured the boys, telling them they would be shown no mercy by government soldiers. "He told us that children should keep fighting and, if we did, that by 2006 we would have overpowered the government. But now I know that those who remain in the bush should give up and come back," says Ojok. "Otherwise children will carry on losing their lives."