Tsunami children find parents
Banda Aceh (AsiaNews/Agencies) Hope never dies in tsunami-stricken Indonesia. According to UN figures 50 children have found their parents in the hardest-hit city of Banda Aceh. However, this is but a drop in the bucket. The estimated number of orphans is as high as 10,000.
Local UN officials who monitor shelters and refugee camps have said that it might take six months before all the orphans can be registered.
UNICEF child-tracing teams are systematically searching the area. So far they have found 850 without a family.
Every day, their workers go to refugee camps and neighbourhoods to register new children and to make sure those already catalogued have not moved.
According to Frederic Sizaret, a UNICEF child protection officer, "if the child is convinced 100 per cent that the parents are still alive, we act as investigators."
Once the children's profiles are collected, their names are posted on bulletin boards all over the city and can be cross-referenced with forms filled out by distraught parents who show up at various child agencies.
Most children survivors stay with neighbours, extended family members or friends. Eyewitnesses confirm that many women act as surrogate mothers for the orphans who still cling on the hope of finding their parents.
In Indonesia the tsunami that devastated south-east Asia killed 123,487; another 113,961 are still missing.
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