Before the earthquake, Ruthza St. Louis was an accredited therapist in Port-au-Prince, specializing in counseling rape victims. Now she has become a detective of sorts, walking the city’s rubble-strewn streets, talking to children who are on their own and then using every resource she can to locate caring relatives who can take them in. This sleuthing is no small feat in a country where an estimated 1.5 million survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake no longer have homes, let alone official records like birth certificates. But St. Louis is volunteering for the U.N. Children’s Fund , which, along with other aid groups, is working to register as many kids as possible who were orphaned or separated from their parents during the disaster, and then trying to reconnect them with their families. So far, UNICEF says, it has registered close to 200 children, and it expects to have thousands logged by year’s end.
