BANDA ACEH, 9 February 2005 — The number of children left without any surviving relatives in Indonesia’s tsunami-devastated Aceh province may not be as high as initially feared, an international aid agency said yesterday.
At its dusty headquarters in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, Save the Children unveiled a consolidated list of more than 175 children who have been found alone.
The list was collated with three other organizations, including the Ministry of Social Affairs, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second-biggest Muslim organization.
“This is a first step, it’s not the final step, in working together to make it easier for parents to know what children have been found,” senior Save the Children official Mike Kiernan said. He said many more would likely be added to the list in coming weeks.
“This is not an exhaustive list by any means but it’s a step in the right direction. It does indicate that the number of children who are alone is smaller than we initially thought, and that’s good news,” he said.
“The striking thing that we’ve found in going to the camps is that most children, the vast majority of children, do have someone to care for them. Very few children, we’ve found, are alone. We don’t know what the final estimate is going to be.”
A report issued by the World Bank and Indonesian authorities last month estimated that nearly 8,000 children may have lost both their parents. Tens of thousands more are thought to have lost one parent to the Dec. 26 tsunami which may have killed as many as 300,000 people around the Indian Ocean, from Thailand to Somalia.
Aceh province on the northwestern tip of Sumatra island lay closest to the epicenter of the magnitude 9 earthquake and bore the brunt of the deaths. Authorities said yesterday 115,628 bodies had so far been buried and 127,749 people were still unaccounted for.
Photos of missing children can be found stuck to almost any available surface in Banda Aceh — shop windows, suburban fences and makeshift notice boards at refugee camps.
“Idris, 7 years old. He was wearing a red shirt and shorts,” says one photo caption, giving a contact phone number for the boy’s anxious relatives.
The number of parents missing children and children missing parents is a reminder that the lasting psychological damage resulting from one of the world’s worst natural disasters may never heal, festering long after the rebuilding of devastated homes and livelihoods. Kiernan said painstaking efforts were being made to ensure that no mismatches were made in reuniting families.
“That is a major concern of ours and there is a very rigorous validation process we go through to ensure that the adult claiming a child is the real parent or relative,” he said.
Adults seeking lost children are shown five pictures of youngsters. If they correctly identify the missing child, additional questions are asked, such as the child’s favorite food, the names of school friends and what they were last seen wearing. The child is also asked questions and shown pictures of adults.
“We do have some negatives. We do have disappointing news, but we haven’t had anyone try to come in and hoodwink us yet,” said Kiernan.
Before the consolidated list had been drawn up, Save the Children had 71 youngsters on its list, just 15 of whom had been reunited with relatives since the tsunami.
“It’s slow. It’s painstaking. Work on the database is going on 24 hours a day. It’s certainly going to take months before we get this all sorted out. Months of hard work,” Kiernan said. “We want to keep the child within a family unit as best we can, and then we want to keep the child in school. That is key in normalizing their lives.”
