BAM, Iran, 1 January 2004 — Mahsa still has nightmares about the day she woke up to find her parents crushed under the wreckage of their home. But the 11-year-old is one of the lucky ones. Her uncle and aunt have taken her into their makeshift canvas home alongside the ruins of their house in this southeastern Iranian town.
Hundreds of other children in Bam have no one left at all and have been taken into state care since Friday’s earthquake leveled the town’s traditional mud-brick buildings. Tears form in Mahsa’s big brown eyes as she tells how she went to bed as usual beside her parents the night before the quake.
“I heard shouts and a huge noise and the walls fell in on mum and dad,” she says. Her brothers Ehsan, 18, and Hessam, 16, were also killed, along with her grandparents. She was pulled out of the rubble with flesh wounds to the knee and temples.
Mahsa’s aunt, Tahereh Ghadai, says her niece still sleeps with difficulty after the trauma of what happened. “I am going to keep her for ever, I love her,” Ghadai says besides the simple tent that is now their home. “I had two sons and a daughter, now I have two sons and two daughters.”
The youngster says she is desperate to see her best friend Nafisseh. But like many children here, nearly all of her schoolfriends are dead.
Up to 40,000 of the region’s 240,000 inhabitants are estimated to have been killed in the massive quake, which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale according to Iranian seismologists.
“Around 1,500 children are currently in our care,” said Iran’s social services director Mohammad Reza Rah-Shamani.
The Health Ministry said it had received applications from 5,000 families that wanted to adopt them.
“After we saw the pictures of the quake, I spoke to my husband and as we don’t have any children of our own, we decided to adopt a child from Bam,” an Iranian woman in her 30s named Hamideh told state television.
But Rah-Shamani made clear that “for the moment, there is no question of placing them with foster-parents, even temporarily. “We’ve got to settle this issue in accordance with the law,” the social services chief said.
“Not all of the children are necessarily orphans. Their parents may have been moved to hospitals in other cities around the country. “We need to set up a register of all of the displaced to be certain that these children no longer have any surviving family.”
Islamic prohibitions on females sharing living quarters with unrelated males mean that Iranian law on adoptions by strangers is quite stringent.
“A couple need to have been married for five years without having children, provide certification of their physical and mental health, and have sufficient resources,” said lawyer Mehdi Moradi.
Meanwhile, survivors of the earthquake could be regrouped into three immense tent villages to facilitate complex aid distribution and sanitation monitoring, a UN spokesman said. The Iranian authorities currently plan on creating three large camps of 600 tents each, to house victims currently scattered throughout the city in tents put up almost on the remains of their former homes.
At the same time, the relief work of the many different organizations which poured into Bam after Friday’s quake will be concentrated under the Iranian authorities and United Nations agencies.
