Children 's Village offers oasis of hope in Haiti (Feature)

By Franz Smets Jan 28, 2010, 6:56 GMT

Port-au-Prince - Only the usual Haitian chaos is apparent in Santo, adjacent to the Haitian capital: huge crowds on the streets, standing outside bank offices, buying and selling food, or waiting for transportation.

Haiti's devastating earthquake caused little damage just east of Port-au-Prince. Beyond the crowd stands a spacious, walled version of paradise: the SOS Children's Village of Santo, which offers 150 orphans a home in its 19 buildings, along with a school and a football pitch.

The January 12 quake - believed to have killed up at least 150,000 people in Haiti - did not destroy anything in the orphanage. The buildings have been inspected and declared safe.

Despite the sparse physical damage, the disaster has changed everything. As everywhere else in the area affected by the quake and its aftershocks, children no longer sleep indoors. They are scared and prefer to camp under blue awnings.

The school remains closed for now. An extra 20 children have been taken in from the flattened capital, and 500 more are set to arrive next week.

'There are no children in the city who are roaming the streets helplessly,' says Georg Willeit of SOS Children's Villages, an international charity based in Austria. 'Children live in emergency camps, where they are somehow taken care of.'

Many children have lost at least one parent, but most are taken in by relatives or neighbours in the emergency. It falls to aid organizations coordinated by UNICEF to track down those orphans in the absence of functioning Haitian authorities.

For Willeit, an Austrian, establishing the facts and proper line of custody in cases of orphaned children can be very difficult: are there parents, siblings or other relatives? Many issues must be carefully investigated.

Meanwhile, traumatized children find protection and psychological care in the SOS Children's Village with the assistance of experts from Peru and Guatemala.

Willeit's organization assumes that the number of orphans in Haiti has increased greatly as a result of the quake. SOS Children's Villages, which already operates another facility in Cap Haitien on the country's northern coast, has decided to open two more centres in Haiti.

The group and similar non-governmental organizations endeavour to hinder the illegal traffic in children.

Even before the quake, abductions of children disguised as adoptions were already a lucrative business for gangs and corrupt officials. That is why the Haitian government has banned new adoptions in the wake of the quake, at least to start with.

'There is at the time no need whatsoever for international adoptions,' Willeit says. 'What is important is to calmly find out the children's family situation.'

Only later, when it is certain that there are no relatives to be found that the children could grow up with, adoption should be possible as a last resort.