"Haiti Earthquake Devastates Lives of Orphans, Unwanted Children"

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Orphan Population Expected to Increase After Quake; Limited Resources to Care for Them
By SARAH NETTER
Jan. 14, 2010

When the shaking started, they ran -- 20 little girls, all orphans, out of the only home they knew.

When the walls of their suburban Port-au-Prince orphanage came crashing down, their caregivers counted their blessings that no one had died. But then their attention turned to the harsh reality faced by the dozens of owners of the orphanages that dot Haiti's capital -- finding food and shelter for the poorest of the poor, the children nobody wanted.

They also fear that the number of children they will need to care for will increase dramatically.

"We are very scared for the orphans out there," Jon Clark, international director to Haiti for CSI Ministries, told ABCNews.com today. "People are bad off to begin with. This is just going to make things worse."

Port-au-Prince was home to a considerable orphan population before the earthquake hit Tuesday, turning Haiti's capital into a wasteland. While some children had been placed in orphanages because their parents had died, many others are brought to orphanages by their families because disease or poverty left them unable to care for their children.

Now, orphanage owners and missionaries say the number of unwanted children is sure to skyrocket as thousands of Haitian parents come to grips with being stripped of the few resources they had.

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In 2007, UNICEF estimated there were 380,000 orphans in Haiti, which has a population of just over 9 million, according to the CIA World Factbook.

The children at the H.O.P.E. Center, run by CSI Ministries, could be considered among the lucky. Clark, based in the U.S., said he has made contact with Toby Banks, director of the medical clinic adjacent to the orphanage, located in Croix Des Bouquets, about 4 miles from the earthquake's epicenter.

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