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...serious is the threat? Supervisors in at least one refugee center in Sri Lanka report that people have turned up asking if they can buy children. But government officials say they have found no credible evidence of organized trafficking in the country. Indonesian volunteers helping displaced kids in Aceh--where 35,000 or more children have been orphaned or separated from their parents--tell TIME they are approached daily by people falsely claiming to be relatives of the orphans. UNICEF director Carol Bellamy warned of the danger after agency employees in Indonesia received text messages from a group purporting...
Those who still want to help have options. Both the French and Italian governments have set up programs that will allow people to sponsor tsunami orphans. In the U.S., the Christian mission Gospel for Asia, based in Carrollton, Texas, is raising funds to build 10 "transition homes" in Sri Lanka alone. But there's also the risk that with so many bereft children, local governments won't be able to find new homes for all of them, which could make thousands of orphans permanent wards of their respective states. Perhaps then their adoption by foreigners will not seem such...
Relief workers say many orphans are suffering from both physical and psychological trauma. Martin Dawes, a UNICEF spokesman in Colombo, Sri Lanka, says many are "in a state of denial." Some who saw their mothers drown, he says, cling to the belief that Mom has just gone to the ocean for a while, and that she will soon return. Protecting children from exploitation is another priority. Previous disasters have demonstrated that kids are targets for gangs involved in human trafficking, which thrives in parts of the region. The issue was thrown into stark relief following reports that a missing...
Elsewhere, relief workers have found themselves caught up in civil wars that have been raging for years. In Sri Lanka, there were hopes for some kind of peace, however temporary, between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels who have waged a 21-year war for independence in the northern part of the country. Scores of displaced Tamil families taking refuge in a school in Kudathanai had gratefully accepted food and water brought by government soldiers. But when soldiers arrived with a specially cooked New Year's meal, refugees refused it on orders from a rebel. That night part...
...crisis of this scale, some tasks require the kind of muscle only a superpower has. The U.S. Navy has 21 ships and 12,600 crew members working on rescue and relief operations in the waters off Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. Seahawk helicopters--their blades filling the air with a fluttering rumble--sidle in and touch down on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln's 4 1/2-acre flight deck. Since sunrise on Jan. 1, the carrier's Seahawks have been flying from 13 to 17 missions a day. "We're going nonstop from dawn until sunset. Then the commanders meet, talk about...