Washington, D.C. is a fascinating city for a journalist. At times, however, one can reach the saturation point on posturing pols, events staged solely for cameras, and the other sundry forms of pseudo reality so prevalent here. When one is feeling sated in this way, it is time for a vacation. In late July I was ready for one. Instead, I got a more bracing opportunity: to fly to Goma, Zaire, to cover a raging cholera epidemic among Rwandan exiles.

In Washington, a big occupational hazard is hype: p.r. types are busy beguiling you into reporting the phony as if it were authentic. But in the refugee zone. I discovered, an occupational hazard was inadvertent understatement: things were too real, intense, terrifying, anti perverse, and the extremes were hard, if not impossible, to convey fully through conventional news formulas.

A second hazard was Zairian officialdom.

"We need more doctors, nurses, and relief workers, not more journalists," a Zairian immigration man, on the border with Uganda, told a group of us. The quaver in his voice seemed to suggest a deeply felt aversion to pack journalism. At length, a $ 20 bill slipped him by a fellow traveler seemed to change his perspective. And, two dozen other missteps and farcical delays and a $ 130 visa shakedown later, I had reached Goma, frayed and unshaven.

By then, the tone of the journey had shifted from Scoop-like absurdity to something much darker. The last hour of the drive to Goma had taken us through the very worst parts of the refugee cholera region. First we came to a few bodies by the side of the road, some wrapped in straw mats or blankets, others exposed and bloated. Then more bodies, and more, and more: impossible to count but maybe 2,000 in all.

One point has not been stressed enough -- the role of mass communications in creating this disaster. The large scale massacres of Tutsis by Hutu hardliners (which began in April, after the death of Rwanda's president in a mysterious plane crash), had been incited in part by Radio Mille Collines, an organ of the hardliners, according to U.N. officials. Later, when Tutsi rebels were on the brink of victory, the government used Radio Mille Collines to call upon Hutus to flee to Zaire, a reckless idea considering that the cross-border area, with no supply of clean water, was a breeding ground for cholera. Well over one million Hutus heeded the radio reports and were soon dying in droves. Radio Mille Collines: news with an impact.

In Goma, news teams were camped in tents around a French military compound. Pack journalism was in full swing. Some reporters broke news. But many of us, perhaps because we were overwhelmed by what we were seeing, fell back on the formulas of disaster reporting. We did variations on the same stories -- a day in the life of a relief worker, orphans find saviors, etc. -- and then were replaced by new reporters who rediscovered these yarns and spun them again.

One had to hope that the pieces were keeping the public interested and doing some good by encouraging charity contributions, despite being rather pale reflections of the surreal horrors of the field. And surreal they were. Along that road north of Goma, children laughed and played within a few yards of rotting corpses. Families tried to hawk fruits spread out on roadside blankets close beside other bodies. Cooking fires pocked the landscape and their smoke darkened the sun. In one forest clearing, hundreds of bodies awaited burial. It was like stepping into Hieronymous Bosch's painting "Last Judgment," with its darkness and fire and tormented figures. Even the most vivid TV pictures were really unable to put this scene across.

At times, one could not help but feel exploitative.

There was a father, perhaps thirty-five, who stood on the roadside clutching his son, who looked about thirteen. The boy had slumped to the ground and appeared very close to death. The father could not accept this. He lifted the boy's head up with both hands, but it slumped back to his chest. He manipulated the boy's arms, but they dropped limply. He tried to make the boy walk, but the legs kept collapsing. I watched part of this scene through the view-finder of my camera. What I remember, above all, are the father's eyes as he stared directly back at me. They were wide, yellowish, and seemed almost to glow with hatred. I felt like a scavenger. That observation is, of course, yet another cliche of disaster reporting. But the emotion of the moment, the sense of shame, was not stale at all.

Even the most dramatic third world stories tend to run their course rather quickly. One sign that the end is near is when big names from the West begin arriving to use the agony scene as a backdrop for messages of concern. These visitors bring with them the pseudo-reality that reporters from places like Washington may have sought to escape.

So it was that Tipper Gore visited Goma in early August, toured a refugee camp, gave water to a sick refugee, helped lift a Rwanndan onto a stretcher, as cameras clicked. (TIPPER GORE HELPS DOCTORS IN REFUGEE CAMPS, as the A.P. headline put it.) And so it was that the Rev. Al Sharpton, human rights activist qua New York Senate candidate, arrived to declare the United States was not doing enough. ("We should be where the danger is. We don't need secluded involvement out there," he told NPR.)

I was sitting in the press compound one day when a reporter from New York informed me that Sharpton's arrival was imminent. At the moment, I was wondering if it were time to go home. Now I knew it was.

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