Rescue and Aid
Smallest survivors pose one of biggest problems
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-27 16:53
 |
Large Medium Small |
|
 An earthquake victim recuperates in the Diquini hospital in Port-au-Prince. Vast crowds of Haitians massed around aid stations, threatening to overwhelm emergency food handouts against a backdrop of new political and seismic aftershocks. [Agencies]  |
At Port-au-Prince's General Hospital, Haitian-born pediatrician Winston Price, a volunteer from New York, was caring for some 80 children in four tents on the hospital grounds. A handful had been brought in with no clues to their families. Price could only wonder.
"Maybe some of these parents are not even looking because their house was destroyed and they might think the kid was inside," he said. "But maybe the kid was pulled out, so they are missing each other."
Children left alone are everywhere. At one of the 13 Save the Children sites, about 25 children have no adult relatives taking care of them, Conradt said. She said the group has helped some 6,000 children since the quake.
The aid group's "Child Spaces" are cordoned-off areas where children can play under supervision, "run around being children, giving them a chance to return to normalcy as much as they can," she said.
Such areas also protect children against the potential for abduction by child traffickers, a chronic problem in pre-quake Haiti, where thousands were handed over to other families into lives of domestic servitude, said Deb Barry, an emergency protection adviser with Save the Children.
She said her organization is working to track down every rumor it hears about threats to stranded children, "but we haven't been able to verify those thus far."
In Geneva, a UNICEF spokeswoman, Veronique Taveau, said the organization had been told of children disappearing from hospitals. "It's difficult to establish the reality," she said, but added that UNICEF has strengthened security at hospitals and orphanages.
Government spokeswoman Marie Laurence Jocelyn-Lassegue, the communications minister, said Tuesday that Haitian officials have temporarily halted new adoptions because of concerns about corruption and carelessness in the system.
"Some children we don't know if the parents are alive or not," Jocelyn-Lassegue said.
