A Merlin aid worker describes a journey into the Russian-declared buffer zone surrounding South Ossetia.

Dirbi village was the point on the map, we had been warned, where danger simply gave way to the unknown. With the afternoon wearing on, our team leader, calculating the remaining daylight against the journey time out of this hazardous area, gave us 25 minutes to do what we could and leave the village.

The Merlin team treated an ailing elderly diabetic and a one-year old baby close by, while the villagers went to fetch a more distant gunshot case whom we would not otherwise have a chance to treat.

He arrived in a dusty blue Lada car and our doctor quickly treated him laid out across the back-seat, cleaning and dressing the several days-old wound as his fellow villagers looked on. Later we heard that the man had a second, minor, wound in his buttock, but had been too embarrassed to expose it before the crowd.

In village after village like this one, where we are helping as many people as we can while assessing damage to the area’s health infrastructure, people tell us that no-one is in control. Some tell of shooting at night. In Dzevera a gutted house is still smouldering as we enter around midday, set alight that night. It belongs to an elderly, stooped woman â€" she barely reaches our shoulders â€" who is crying on the street nearby.

We are finding many elderly people left behind in the villages, those too old or infirm to flee, or just with nowhere else to go.

In Karaleti the health clinic has been torched. Villagers tell us that it had re-opened after renovations just days before the conflict began. Further north, in Mereti, the clinic is pristine, but deserted. Medical instruments and drugs lie neatly stacked in glass-fronted cupboards, an abandoned coffee cup stands on a desk. It looks as if the staff â€" who have fled â€" have just popped outside for a smoke.

But in Didi-Mergjvriskhevi, nestled in a salient jutting out into South Ossetia, the townspeople tell us they feel no fear. This eastern-central verge of the Russian-declared buffer zone surrounding South Ossetia seems less dangerous. One woman told us that Georgians and Ossetians here are like brothers and sisters. She pulled a one-toothed woman out of the gathered crowd and hugged her: “She’s Ossetian, but she’s like an auntie to me.”

Much further down, in Kheltubani, where a battle had raged around them in their fields, the villagers are clearly traumatised. Many still have their bags packed in case they need to move in a hurry. Stress is a major issue. People have asked us whether we have drugs to calm their nerves.

But amidst all this, life goes on. In Plavi the villagers tell us to come quick, come quick â€" a woman has just been bitten by a dog. We sit the patient, a woman in her fifties, in the back of our four-wheel drive and our nurse dresses the wound.

As she does, there is a loud explosion nearby. We have been hearing them for days â€" unexploded munitions littering the area are being disposed of by bomb squads. Two of our team with experience of conflict zones judge the sound to be an artillery round being used in earnest. Our nurse finishes up fast, leaving the patient with iodine and spare dressings â€" and instructions to observe the dog closely over the next few days for signs of rabies.

Later, back down in the safety of Gori, the regional centre, we meet a local doctor from an ambulance medical team, drooping with what we take to be exhaustion. “No, it’s not tiredness,” she says, “I’ve just seen too much these past few weeks.”

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 Have a look at Merlin's work in Georgia from 2001 to 2007