Survivors keep hope for missing

The last time that Yayuk saw her baby daughter Ananda, she was in the arms of her husband, Zulkifli, as Yayuk and her family were running away from a towering wave in their seaside community in Banda Aceh. Then the wave came, knocked Zulkifli down, and sucked Ananda - and Yayuk's other daughters - away.

But that's where the story of Yayuk and Zulkifli's search begins. Forty days later, a family friend said that a neighbor had rescued Ananda, literally turning the child upside down to get the seawater out. The neighbor didn't know Ananda's family, but handed the child over to someone who said they did know Zulkifli and Yayuk. Nothing has been heard of the child since.

Today, Yayuk has spray-painted a sign on her house asking anyone who finds Ananda to please call her cellphone. She says she knows her child is alive, but she worries that the foster family may have fallen in love with Ananda. She doesn't know if she'll see her daughter again.

"I need a miracle," says Yayuk, who like many Acehnese goes by one name. "She is so small, she cannot speak, so if we don't search for her, she can't find us." She chokes back tears. "I had three daughters, and if I know that one is saved, I need to see her grow up. I need to take care of her myself."

Nearly three months after the Dec. 26 tsunami struck Banda Aceh, and countries from the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Sea, there are still hundreds and possibly thousands of separated families in this battered corner of Indonesia. For every story of reunification that one sees on TV, there are hundreds more advertisements in newspapers and handmade posters on walls that tell a different story, of separation, and the struggle of hope against despair.

The scale of the disaster is so massive that the Indonesian government has handed over the task of tracking and, when possible, reuniting separated children with their families to a handful of international and local humanitarian groups, such as UNICEF, Save the Children, and Mohamadiya.

Aid workers say they now have a system in place to track and register children who have been identified as separated from their parents. But the process is slow by design, aimed to protect the child's interests first, something that may be frustrating to parents who are searching for their children. And yet, with more than a thousand children to place - and more being registered every day - it is important to make sure that every child is placed with their own parents, or the closest living relative, and barring that, then with members of the community where the child was raised.

"It's quite natural in large movements of people, and particularly when people are fleeing, that some children are separated from their parents," says Tirana Hassan of Save the Children, the lead agency in reconnecting separated children with their families.

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