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Oil Scramble to help thousands of orphans
January 20, 2010 Edition 2
PORT-AU-PRINCE: The five-month-old patient at the Israeli field hospital has a number rather than a name.
No one even knows who left the barely conscious child at the makeshift medical centre after he was pulled from the debris of a collapsed building four days after last week's catastrophic quake. He is recovering, but doctors will face a difficult decision.
"What will we do with him when we are finished?" Dr Assa Amit, of the hospital's paediatric emergency department, said.
No one knows who the boy's family is or whether any of his relatives are alive.
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 last Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 earthquake, Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, was awash with orphans, with 380 000 children living in orphanages or group homes, the UN Children's Fund reported on its website.
Some of the children had lost their parents in other disasters, including four tropical storms or hurricanes in which about 800 people died in 2008, deadly storms in 2005 and 2004, and severe floods almost every other year since 2000.
Others have been abandoned amid the Caribbean nation's long-running political strife, which has led thousands of people to seek asylum in the US - without their children - or by parents simply too poor to care for them.
International advocacy groups are trying to help, by speeding up adoptions that were in progress, or by sending in relief personnel who could potentially move thousands of orphans to the US and other countries.
On Monday, the Dutch government sent a planeload of immigration officials to Haiti to try to locate and evacuate 100 children who were being adopted by Dutch parents.
Indiana-based Kids Alive International, which runs orphanages around the world, has said it is to take 50 Haitian orphans to group homes in the Dominican Republic.
American Homeland Security spokesman Sean Smith said orphans who had ties to the US - such as a relative living here - were among those who could get special permission to settle in the country.
Notwithstanding this policy, the Catholic Church in Miami is working on a proposal that would allow thousands of orphaned children to come permanently to the US.
A similar effort launched in 1960, known as Operation Pedro Pan, brought about 14 000 unaccompanied children from Cuba to the US.
Under the new plan, dubbed "Pierre Pan", Haitian orphans would first be placed in group homes and then paired with foster parents, said Mary Ross Agosta, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami.
"We have children who are homeless and possibly without parents, and it is the moral and humane thing to do."
Archdiocese officials said many details would have to be worked out and President Barack Obama's administration would have to grant orphans humanitarian parole to enter the US.
United Nations humanitarian chief John Holmes said the UN was establishing a group whose mission on the ground in Haiti would be to protect children - orphans and non-orphans - against trafficking, kidnapping and sex abuse.
Orphanages in Haiti with damaged buildings are pledging to rebuild and take in more children. - Sapa-AP
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