The boy with the big grin and the big scar across his nose wants something more, though: “Can we go look for my mum? Can we go look for my parents?” he asked a worker on Wednesday at the orphanage where he’s been brought.

The smallest survivors of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake are growing into one of the biggest problems in its aftermath.

Countless thousands of children are scattered among Port-au-Prince’s makeshift camps of homeless and many have nobody to care for them, aid workers say, leaving them without protection against disease, child predators and other risks.

“They are extremely vulnerable,” said Kate Conradt, a spokeswoman for the aid group Save the Children. She said U.N. experts estimate there may be 1 million youngsters who lost at least one parent in the Jan. 12 quake or are separated from their families.

Some young Haitians are even being released from hospitals with no one to care for them. There just aren’t enough beds.

U.N. workers had spotted Wodson for several days, alone and begging on the street in the refugee camp that has filled the Champs de Mars plaza before the national palace.

When a reporter asked him what happened, he said in a matter-of-fact way, “I felt the ground shaking and I just stood there. I saw the National Palace falling down.”

The l’Escale orphanage where Wilson stayed is among a handful of private institutions around Port-au-Prince that the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF is using for Haitian children separated from parents.

Ringed by a big stone wall, the orphanage had a couple of dozen children before. UNICEF has brought eight since the quake with five more on the way, a tiny fraction of those in need.

UNICEF, Save the Children and the Red Cross have begun registering at-risk children and sending some to orphanages such as l’Escale — the name means “in transit” — where they can be temporarily sheltered, said Bo Viktor Nylund, a senior UNICEF adviser for child protection.

The Connecticut-based Save the Children, meanwhile, has set up “Child Spaces” for unaccompanied youths in 13 makeshift settlements. And the three agencies are working to reunite families, by creating a joint database of separated family members.

“This is just the begining of the exercise,” Nylund said. “Considering the number of people who died in the earthquake, we are expecting children in the thousands who have lost their parents.”

The plight of the young is especially poignant even in a country where the U.N. estimates one-third of the 9 million people need international assistance.

The needs are evident in Port-au-Prince’s streets, alleys and crumbled doorways, where handwritten messages beg for help. In the Juvenat neighborhood, a group of 50 families scrawled in green on a white sheet hung from a doorway: “We need food assistance, water and medicine.”

It is evident, too, among thousands of people pressing against the gates of food-distribution sites across the city, pushing forward even as police used pepper spray and clubs in an attempt to restore order.

“These people are just hungry,” Vincenzo Pugliese, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission, said on Wednesday. He said U.N. forces have boosted security at food distribution centers.

Thomas Louis, 40, who was trying to get rice and oil for his two babies on Tuesday, said Haitians appreciated the foreign help, but he complained about the lack of organization. “This is anarchy. This is not aid. This is a way to put people down.”

The monumental scale of the Haiti disaster — perhaps 200,000 dead, a capital city on its knees — has severely strained the world’s ability to get relief supplies through Port-au-Prince’s overloaded airport and crippled seaport.

Some 800 to 1,000 aid flights were still awaiting permission to land, a seven-day backlog, U.N. and European officials said Tuesday. John Holmes, U.N. humanitarian coordinator, estimated 2 million people need food, but only 500,000 have received some so far.

The medical picture has improved, but remains critical. World Health Organization spokesman Paul Garwood said more medical staff were needed, especially rehabilitation specialists, to help with postoperative recovery of 200,000 people who have had amputations or other surgery.

Haitian and volunteer staff from dozens of countries work around the clock. In some hospitals, they are still performing up to 100 amputations a day.

At Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital, Haitian-born pediatrician Winston Price, a volunteer from New York, was caring for some 80 children in four tents on the hospital grounds on Tuesday. A handful had been brought in with no clues to their families. Price could only wonder.

“Maybe some of these parents are not even looking because their house was destroyed and they might think the kid was inside,” he said. “But maybe the kid was pulled out, so they are missing each other.”

Children left alone are everywhere. At one of the 13 Save the Children sites, about 25 children have no adult relatives taking care of them, Conradt said. She said the group has helped some 6,000 children since the quake.

The aid group’s “Child Spaces” are cordoned-off areas where children can play under supervision, “run around being children, giving them a chance to return to normalcy as much as they can,” she said.

Such areas also protect children against the potential for abduction by child traffickers, a chronic problem in pre-quake Haiti, where thousands were handed over to other families into lives of domestic servitude, said Deb Barry, an emergency protection adviser with Save the Children.

She said her organization is working to track down every rumor it hears about threats to stranded children, “but we haven’t been able to verify those thus far.”

In Geneva, a UNICEF spokeswoman, Veronique Taveau, said the organization had been told of children disappearing from hospitals. “It’s difficult to establish the reality,” she said, but added that UNICEF has strengthened security at hospitals and orphanages.

Government spokeswoman Marie Laurence Jocelyn-Lassegue, the communications minister, said Tuesday that Haitian officials have temporarily halted new adoptions because of concerns about corruption and carelessness in the system.

“Some children we don’t know if the parents are alive or not,” Jocelyn-Lassegue said.

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Associated Press writers contributing to this story included Michelle Faul and Jonathan M. Katz in Port-au-Prince; Eliane Engeler and Frank Jordans in Geneva, and John Rice in Mexico City.

Jan 21 – A Port-au-Prince orphanage is struggling to cope with smaller premises and new children arriving who lost parents in last week’s devastating quake.

Thursday afternoon, nine days after a massive earthquake pitched this nation into widespread ruin, a group of Haitian nannies sang 83 babes off to new lives.

The children, from the God’s Littlest Angels orphanage in the mountains outside this city, were on the way to the United States.

After winding its way down a long mountain road and weaving through Port-Au-Prince on one last long day, the caravan of toddlers prepared to leave, kissed by lilting Creole lullabyes from those who delivered them to new lives.

These were not this rattled country’s newest orphans, born of the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake. Instead, these were the lucky ones.

View full sizeBruce Ely/The OregonianNurse Nicole Douglas holds baby Rose-leure as the group boards the plane bound for Miami. An infection caused seizures and breathing problems for the child early in the day, but was stable enough for the two-hour flight.They had survived the quake and instead of many more months — perhaps even years — of red tape, they were now on the way to join their newly-minted American parents.

While more bureaucracy surely lies ahead, much of it now lay in the ruins of the capital city.

Part of this group was a Beaverton man who, with his wife, had already been in the process of adopting a toddler from the God’s Littlest Angels. In fact, the Wilkins – Joe and Jill — had visited the orphanage just two weeks before the quake struck.

But Thursday marked the first time that Joe had seen the boy since last week’s disaster. While the big quake had damaged the orphanage, none of the 160 children who call it home were injured.

It seemed a miracle, especially after two more aftershocks shook the building in the final hours before the caravan was to leave.

So early on this long day, Joe Wilkins finally got to again hold Samuel Chancelet, his new 20-month-old boy.

Back in Beaverton, Jill works in communications at LSI Corp. and Joe teaches third grade at Greenway Elementary.

But on Thursday, while Jill waited in Miami, Joe made the perilous journey to the orphanage in Fermate, a village in the mountains southeast of Port-au-Prince.

Joe made the trip to the orphanage rode in a rented, 5-seat truck powered by an engine that sounded like an overworked lawnmower.

From Port Au Prince, the road to Fermate — the town where the orphanage sits — first heads east to Petionville, climbing into the cool green mountains. No switchbacks ease the way. Then the route turns southward, crawling down a steep, long slope.

Finally, a red truck in a valley between mountains marks the turn into the orphange. Inside a locked green gate sits God’s Littlest Angels.

Once inside, Joe was reunited with his son.

The Wilkins had worried that the earthquake would prolong the already lengthy adoption process. They feared months of paperwork were lost amid the rubble of government buildings.

But in this case, the quake had actually made things easier and Samuel Chancelet and his new father became part of the group that left for new homes.

Certainly, the final day here was anything but easy.

The aftershocks, one of which was later gauged at about 5.0, left the children frightened and crying.

Some workers and visitors comforted them as best they could, and took many outside, while others — Joe Wilkins included — were dispatched to help search for cracks in the walls, ceilings and foundation.

View full sizeBruce Ely/The OregonianJoe Wilkins of Beaverton holds his and wife Jill’s newly adopted son, Samuel Chancelet, 20 months, Thursday morning at the God’s Littlest Angels in Fermate, Haiti. Eventually, when the shaking had stopped, the director called for the children to be taken back upstairs to be dressed for their journey.

But even after a morning punctuated by the aftershocks, it wasn’t easy leaving. For one thing, Samuel and the others may miss out of the culture and history of their native Haiti.

And no doubt they will be deeply missed by the volunteers at God’s Littlest Angels.

But everyone knew a world of possibility awaits them

Finally, after the steep, scary return drive, the caravan reached the airport and the children and new parents waited to board their plane.

As it sat on the tarmac, a beautiful sunset rolled down while the children snuggled in the laps of the flight crews that welcomed them

As aid workers scrambled to set up child-friendly zones in Port-au-Prince, a string of relief groups called for a moratorium yesterday on new adoptions.

They fear the potential for children to be whisked out of the country before they could be reunited with their families.

“The vast majority of the children currently on their own still have family members alive who will be desperate to be reunited with them and will be able to care for them with the right support,” said Carolyn Miles of Save the Children.

This week, U.S. officials waived visa requirements for Haitian children already on the path to adoption. That paved the way for Tuesday’s arrival in the U.S. of roughly 50 Haitian orphans.

But what will happen to the thousands of children who have lost their parents in the earthquake is still being hammered out, officials say.

“We’re not sure right now how it’s all going to work,” said John VanValkenburg, a spokesman for Bethany Christian Services, one of the nation’s largest adoption agencies.

Even before the quake, adopting Haitian children was thorny due to the number of kids in orphanages who still have parents.

“It’s not at all uncommon for poor families to put [their kids] in orphanages with a view of getting them back later,” said Christopher de Bono, a Unicef spokesman.

This boy was very lucky that he was even found deep in the rubble, he is a true survivor.

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