Jagan, center, listens to his guardian as he sits along with other children at a newly opened orphanage for children at Sikkal, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Jan. 3, 2005. (AP Photo/Gurinder Osan)

Since the disaster, adoption agencies around the world have been fielding phone calls from well-meaning families wanting to adopt a child from one of the countries hit.

Adoption experts say the best thing people can do is to donate money to causes that directly help the children. They say it's wrong to take a traumatized child away from the environment that they have grown up in.

"Adoptions, especially inter-country ones, are inappropriate during the emergency phase as children are better placed being cared for by their wider families and the communities they know," said the charity Save the Children in a statement released Jan. 6, 2005.

"The last thing they need to do is be rushed away to some foreign land," said Cory Barron of Children's Hope International, an American adoption agency. "We have to think of the child first."

The Canadian response

Children survivors sit outside their makeshift tent in the middle of the road in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province, Dec. 31, 2004, in northwest Indonesia. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

"If the person in the tsunami region has no family there, and only has family in Canada, then we will take action," announced Immigration Minister Judy Sgro at a news conference on Jan. 7, 2005. Sgro says immigration officials will examine applications on a case-by-case basis. Under the family class designation, spouses, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews can be reunited with family in Canada.

Canadian immigration officials are already on the ground in Asia processing some of the people, fast-tracking their security and medical checks.

To help the process along, the Ontario government will be waiving fees on international adoptions of children orphaned by the disaster. Children's Services Minister Marie Bountrogianni said the province will scrap the $460 it charges for international adoptions involving relatives and $925 for non-relatives.

An estimated 600,000 people in the Toronto area have family in the tsunami region and many would be hard-pressed to come up with the fees on top of legal expenses.

Displaced children – what happens in the meantime

"Our staff are trained to watch for this," Linda Tripp, vice-president for World Vision Canada, told CBC News Online. "In these situations, families tend to stick together so it's fairly easy to spot an errant child."

Tripp says her charity is setting up safe places for children; more than 20 are up and running in Indonesia. Children are allowed to play and since they're in a specific area, staff can make sure they get the water, food or vaccines they need.

"They have access to counselling and there are child-care workers, so they are taken care of emotionally and physically," says Tripp. World Vision workers are also taking notes on the children they come in contact with.

Eventually, the aid organizations will be co-ordinating a more formal process of cataloguing the children along with the United Nations.

Meanwhile, the UN children's fund UNICEF confirmed on Jan. 7, 2005, the first case of trafficking in children in the disaster zone. Officials say a four-year-old boy was taken from Banda Aceh, Indonesia, by a couple claiming to be his parents.

Counter-trafficking experts have been deployed in the tsunami-hit regions to raise awareness of the problem as aid agencies struggle to identify the children affected. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency, estimates a quarter of a million people are trafficked through Southeast Asia annually. Many are exploited sexually or used for domestic labour.

Police guards have been posted at tsunami refugee camps in Indonesia to prevent the kidnapping of children by traffickers. UNICEF officials say criminal gangs are posing as aid workers or family friends to gain access to orphaned or displaced children.

These concerns have prompted the governments of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the two hardest-hit countries, to forbid anyone from taking children under 16 out of the affected areas. Aid officials estimate more than 35,000 children have been orphaned in Indonesia and another 300 in Thailand, while in Sri Lanka, officials are attempting to count and identify children among the 800,000 people who have been displaced.

The disaster aside, most countries in the region have strict rules on international adoptions because of fears of sexual abuse or child slavery. Indonesia and Malaysia rarely allow non-Muslim adoptions. Both nations require prospective parents to live in the country for at least two years prior to adopting.

The U.S. State Department as well as several European countries, such as Germany, France and Italy, have ruled out the adoption of children from the tsunami zone, at least for the next several months. Franco Frattini, the European commissioner for justice and home affairs, said the European Union might make it easier for Europeans to become temporary foster parents for children in those areas.

"My proposal is to … allow young people from the areas hit by the tsunami to come to Europe, spend some months here and then go back home."

Whether the children end up with family members or with people who want to care for them, "they are marked for life," as one UNICEF official said.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Citizenship and Immigration Canada: international adoptions

Adoption Council of Canada

Family Helper: list of adoption agencies