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Reuniting lost children with relatives
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The UN children's agency, UNICEF, along with Save the Children and the Red Cross, has begun registering at-risk children. The organization has set up three
interim care centers at local orphanages. Combined, they can provide temporary shelter for 900 unaccompanied children.
Caroline Bakker, UNICEF Child Protection Specialist, said, "What for us is important is that ... we are exhausting all the efforts we have to find their parents or their extended family and reunite those children back into their family.It's only when we have exhausted all the possibilities we have that we will look into other forms of alternative care for those children and inter-country adoptions or national adoptions are options or possibilities within the alternative care."
Rodrigue, a 12-year-old Haitian boy, is one of the tens of thousands of children orphaned by the quake.
Rodrigue said, "I was playing football outside with two of my friends and then I heard the earthquake and I felt the ground shaking, I ran back to my house and found it destroyed and my parents were dead."
Aid workers are now looking after him in temporary accommodations, before a more permanent solution can be found.
Compared to him, Sindy is more lucky.
The 11-year-old girl, became separated from her parents during the quake, but aid workers helped to reunite them.
Sindy said, "They called my uncle and then took me to my parents. I was so happy to see them, I hugged them and they were so happy to see me again."
The need to protect unaccompanied children is vital because of the potential for abduction by child traffickers.
The Haitian government said on Tuesday that it had temporarily halted new adoptions because of concerns about corruption and carelessness within the system.
