[To read more about orphan care and our response, or about vunerable children even in our own country, check out the following articles and resources:   There Must Be Something I Can Do , Who Is My Child? , The Most Vulnerable Among Us , How Are Our Children? ,  An Open Letter To My Young Friends In Ivanovo , Grisha's Story: You didn't forget about us , Yana's Story: Do not pity me! , Kolya's Story: Jesus in disguise . ]

Where there is tragedy, there are orphans, more of them.  War, famine, natural disasters, social decay, all of it tends to rip apart families, leaving vulnerable children without the care of a parent.  This is no surprise.  Tragedy makes us all a bit more vulnerable.  For children its worse.

And so its no surprise that the recent earthquakes in Haiti left tens of thousands of additional children newly orphaned.  Before the earthquakes, Haiti was home to over 380,000 orphans, according to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)¹ .  Now there are more, thousands more.

Some Children Will Go, But Most Should Stay

Some of Haiti’s orphans were already in the pipeline to be adopted by families in other countries, so officials are expediting these adoptions quickly in order to remove as many children from the current crisis as possible.  

There’s a problem, though.  Given the enormous number of orphans already in the country and the thousands more added to the ranks, officials struggle to provide adequate care for the legitimate orphans while doing their best to confirm whether the new children under their care are truly orphaned or simply displaced and separated from their families.  For this reason officials are cautious to implement an airlift style extraction to transport large groups of children to somewhere safe with adequate medical care.  Officials rightly fear that accidentally removing a displaced child from his or her family would only make matters worse in the long run.  For true orphans, its a different matter — if we know whether or not a particular child on the chaotic street is truly orphaned. 

Its hard to know in these circumstances whether or not an abandoned child is a true orphan.  An injured mother might be under medical care somewhere else in the city and unable to look for her child.  A father might have been working across the island when the earthquake struck and is now unable to find transportation to the city to find his child.  

So, the children need to stay, unless and until we are sure they are true orphans.  For now, they need food, clean water, and medicine to treat diahrrea — a common problem — as well as more serious injuries or illnesses.

We need to help relief agencies do what it takes to care for the children in country and not feel pressured for lack of resources to pluck the children from their homeland and away from family members.  

Three agencies working in Haiti have committed to keeping the children in Haiti until true orphan status is confirmed:

• United Nation Children’s Fund or UNICEF (http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=1023561),
• Save The Children (http://www.savethechildren.org/), and
• Salvation Army (http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf). 

In addition, the United Methodist Committee On Relief (UMCOR) has a permament office in Port-au-Prince and has established a long term presence for relief ministry there (www.umcor.org – Click on ”Haiti Emergency, UMCOR Advance #418325.”)

Give to these organizations (or another organization you trust) and designate that your gift support orphan children in Haiti.

Thanks.

© Copyright by Jeffrey Y. Harlow, Ph.D (2010).

1. Voice Of America, January 22, 2010, http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Earthquake-Puts-Haitis-Orphans-in-Greater-Peril-82275902.html