Several thousand people in Burma (also called Myanmar) were severely affected as they completely lost their homes and livelihood after Cyclone Nargis devastated the area last May. Complete villages were razed to the ground, and among the worst sufferers are the children who have lost both their parents and have become orphans. There are thousands of children who have no one now to live with, no one to take care of them. Three year old Than Than Nues is one of them, and she has lost both her parents to the cyclone which destroyed her home in the delta of river Irrawaddy. High rise waves swept through her home in the small hamlet outside Rangoon (also called Yangon) and her parents were among the many who were carried away by the waters.
Such children are, on many occasions, left in the houses of other poor villagers who could not, in any way, look after the new members added to their already underfed families.
The village elder in whose house this child is left says,
If she stays here her future is bleak. She’d be much better off with her older brother
referring to her 18 year old brother who is working in some factory in the town of Mandalay which is a thousand kilometers to the north. But there is no one to bear the expense of the travel.
People who have been separated from the other members of their families due to the cyclone have no means to get reunited.
Over 50 percent of the 135,000 victims of the cyclone were children, and aid agencies like the UNICEF find it quite difficult to cope with the situation. The agencies are now trying to arrange for a system that will help trace out the other members of the families of ’separated and unaccompanied’ children so that they can be reunited. The process is expected to be a long drawn one and it may take anywhere up to two years before all orphaned children are reunited with some surviving relatives.
The tracing system maintains a data base of lost children and information about their relatives anywhere in the country. It worked well after the Tsunami devastation of 2004.
But, the aid workers find it difficult to deal with the situation as the government forces the closure of refugee camps and relocate the people at random. Government hinders the aid agencies from identifying and moving help to flattened villages where there are several children who do not know anything about the whereabouts of their relatives.
Aid agencies like Save the Children and the UNICEF want the families that have given refuge to orphaned children to be supported in order that they will be able to keep the children instead of trying to push them into orphanages where the children will have to remain unidentified and hence without the hope of reunification with relatives.
Christina Torsein, a UNICEF child protection specialist, says,
I can’t stress enough that institutions (like orphanages) should be a last resort.
Source: TimesOnline
