Wading through rivers to count dead bodies

By Ruth Gidley

LONDON (Reuters) - To count the dead they ride motorbikes, charter planes and wade through snake-infested rivers.

The precious statistic can help aid agencies convince a weary world there is a crisis in the jungles of Africa or forgotten corners of Iraq -- where death comes from hunger and disease related to war as well as from war itself.

"There's a humanitarian crisis in Congo, (but) we need data to show there's a problem," said Richard Brennan of aid agency International Rescue Committee (IRC).

Its latest survey in the central African state found 45,000 people a month were dying from war-related hunger and disease, even though the conflict there had ended officially in 2003.

But pinning down precise, and credible, numbers is difficult and often intensely political. To prove its point, the IRC and other agencies have to go to where the dead are.

"It was really difficult to reach some places...We chartered airplanes and boats. We hired motorbikes," Brennan said.

One team came to a riverbank in Congo where the bridge had been washed away and waded across with a precious laptop perched on a team member's head. Villagers, heaving their motorbikes over the waist-high brown water, told them to watch out for snakes.

Other IRC teams visited communities living next to rubbish dumps the size of two-storey houses, and were given piggyback rides across open sewers to ask their questions about births and deaths.