Haiti quake creates thousands of new orphans

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-01-19 20:28

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: The 5-month-old patient at the Israeli field hospital has a number rather than a name.

No one even knows who dropped the barely conscious child at the makeshift medical center after he was pulled from the debris of a collapsed building four days after last week's catastrophic quake. Now recovering, doctors have a difficult decision ahead.

Haiti quake creates thousands of new orphans

In a Jan. 18, 2010 photo provided by the American Red Cross, Suzanne Puzo, a Canadian Red Cross nurse, removes bandages on Danise Diverge, 10, in Croix Des Prez, Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.[Agencies]

"What will we do with him when we are finished?" said Dr. Assa Amit of the hospital's pediatric emergency department.

No one knows who the boy's family is, or whether any of his relatives are alive.

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Tens of thousands of children have been orphaned by the earthquake, aid groups say — so many that officials won't venture a number. With so many buildings destroyed and growing chaos in the capital, it is conceivable that many children are alone.

"As yet they are still on the streets," said Elizabeth Rodgers, of the Britain-based international orphan group SOS Children. "Without doubt, most of them are in the open."

Even before Tuesday's deadly magnitude-7.0 earthquake, Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, was awash in orphans, with 380,000 children living in orphanages or group homes, the United Nations Children's Fund reported on its Web site.

A girl enjoys a bottle of water that she just received at the tent city at the Petionville Club, at Delma 40B, in Port Au Prince, Haiti, Monday, Jan. 18, 2010. The U.S. Army is distributing food and water at the tent city.[Agencies]

Some of the children lost their parents in previous disasters, including four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed about 800 people in 2008, deadly storms in 2005 and 2004, and massive floods almost every other year since 2000. Others were abandoned amid the Caribbean nation's long-running political strife, which has led thousands to seek asylum in the US — without their children — or by parents who were simply too poor to care for them.

International advocacy groups are trying to help, either by speeding up adoptions that were already in progress, or by sending in relief personnel who could potentially evacuate thousands of orphans to the US and other countries.

On Monday, the Dutch government sent a planeload of immigration officials to Haiti who will try to locate and evacuate 100 children who were already being adopted by Dutch parents.