INDONESIA: Sitting cross-legged on a hospital cot, oxygen tubes in his nose and a damp cloth on his head to combat the heavy, humid heat of tropical Indonesia, Ikhsan has hardly spoken since he was found unconscious among a pile of bodies. Lynne O'Donnell reports
He stares blankly ahead, only occasionally fixing his focus on one of the faces that surround him. Now and then he coughs, a rasping effort from the depth of his lungs his doctors say is a legacy of his time in the water. He is still passing sand.
The tidal wave hit the western coast of Sumatra island on December 26th as Ikhsan (7) was playing outside his home in Lampaseh village. He was picked up by the wall of water that cut a 10 km swathe along the coast, and flushed inland to another village his aunt, Iche, said was "far away from his home".
Iche found him there five days later, lying among bodies that had been dumped by the filthy waves in a building that had somehow survived the terrific onslaught.
"I was just one of many, many people walking from village to village, among the rubbish, looking for relatives," she said. "There were bodies everywhere, and I found him in a building, lying among other bodies, the only one alive. I found him." Iche, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, took him to doctors who referred him to Medan, the north Sumatran capital a few hundred kilometres away, where he is being treated at the St Elizabeth Hospital.
His parents and older siblings have not been found, and Iche is determined to take him home and care for him as her own. The director of the hospital, Dr Maria Christina, had no way to question Iche's claim to be Ikhsan's only living relative.
Ikhsan has become typical of tens of thousands of children, who represent the most vulnerable victims of the tsunami tragedy. In Indonesia alone, there are an estimated 35,000 children who have lost one or both parents. Many orphans may never be properly identified, let alone resettled in their home villages.
Given the chaos that now prevails along the destroyed Aceh coast, these children are also in danger of becoming victims of another kind, exploited in a variety of ways that neither the government nor the vast number of concerned international aid organisations have much power to prevent.
While stories of gangs converging on the region to steal children for sale into paedophile rings are almost certainly exaggerated, it is true that there is no institutional protection for children who have been separated from their parents and families.
Schools, the key monitoring system for children in Indonesia, are gone, along with local government and every other aspect of normal life. There is no way to ascertain an accurate picture of how many children have been killed or, like Ikhsan, simply been transported by the water to another area. Attempts to register children have only just begun, as aid groups were unable to enter stricken areas for almost a week after the tsunami struck.
Police are monitoring airports to ensure children are not taken out of the country illegally, and the government has decreed that no tsunami children will be available for overseas adoption.
Mr Gregor Nitihardjo, national director in Indonesia of the charity SOS Children, said his group took more than five days to reach Meulaboh, in west Aceh - where more than 28,000 people are confirmed dead - from Jakarta. Even now, he said yesterday, his group can help only about 100 children in refugee camps because they don't have the staff and their movements are restricted by the military co-ordinators of the relief effort.
"They (children) are vulnerable to exploitation if there is not enough protection," Mr Nitihardjo said, speaking by telephone from Jakarta.
"We are talking about many thousands of children so no one can be totally sure that the protection is really adequate," he said, citing fear that traffickers could enter camps posing as refugees.
"If there were enough volunteers working in the hundreds of camps all over the province, then the monitoring of the children would be easier. But 95 per cent of volunteers are working on distributing food and water and cleaning up. Very, very few are working with children, so no one can be sure they are being protected."
There is anecdotal evidence of children being snatched from hospitals, and police in Medan have been contacted by at least two families who feared their children had been kidnapped, according to the Bangkok-based group End Child Prostitution and Trafficking International. Ms Deborah Muir, the group's communications associate, stressed that these reports could not be confirmed.
Mr John Budd, communications director of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, in Jakarta, said his organisation had seen cellphone text messages offering tsunami children for sale in Malaysia.
"We are being careful on the issue of trafficking, but it is this kind of chaotic situation where the issue of child exploitation comes to the fore," Mr Budd said.
Medan, Indonesia's third largest city, was a "notorious centre for the child trade", Mr Budd said.