Lipohar and her international aid outfit, Save the Children, were responsible for the joyous reunions in hard-hit Indonesia last week of a boy and a girl and their parents, nearly a month after the December 26 catastrophe.

She is committed to doing the same for the hundreds of young residents of devastated Aceh province who were separated from their loved ones, saying otherwise they could be consigned to alien foster homes or orphanages or could fall prey to child traffickers.

"Some of them are alone with people, with strangers," Lipohar told AFP. "And some have been taken care of by other relatives. And we have others who are unaccompanied, which means that they are living with people who they met after they fled."

The Canadian knows the pain of uncertainty from working with children separated with their parents in civil wars in Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa.

The family tracing program she works on, supervised by the UN Children's Fund and the social welfare ministry, aims to reunite children with parents, relatives or responsible guardians in their own communities.

"Foster home arrangements are a last resort," said Shantha Bloemen, a UNICEF spokeswoman in the provincial capital Banda Aceh.

Children are interviewed at evacuation camps scattered across the province -- where nearly half a million were displaced -- to determine if they have at least a parent or relative to take care of them.

The names of those without are entered into a list that is posted outside the offices of Save the Children and other groups. Advertisements in newspapers and other media are also planned.

Lipohar said that of the 400 or so children interviewed so far, many living in tent camps for displaced survivors, "less than 10" have been reunited with their families. "The work is just getting started," she said.

"In the camps, everyone has lost somebody. There's an enormous sense of loss in these camps," said Save the Children spokesman Mike Kiernan.

However, while up to 40 percent of the presumed 236,000 tsunami dead in Indonesia were children, the number of potential orphans was not as high as had been expected as many had someone to look after them, he said.

"Initially there was a sense that there were thousands of children who were left alone. What we discovered is that most children in the camps had someone to care for them, 90-95 percent or more," he said.

It helped that in devoutly Muslim Aceh's close-knit communities children separated from their relatives "are all with the families who rescued them," either in tent camps or with relatives in communities that escaped damage.

Nonetheless, said Lipohar, the tracing program had to step up its pace to give the children a chance of seeing, and recognizing, their parents again.

Five weeks after the tsunami disaster, up to 15 families visit the Save the Children office in Banda Aceh every day. Those who claim a child on the list are put through a rigorous verification process.

Their answers are then matched with the child's own. Before a face-to-face meeting, the parents and the child are shown sets of pictures including those of random strangers and asked to identify their relative.

"We understand that people are really devastated about missing their children, so we need to also be patient when the people come here," Lipohar said.

"We can't make a mistake. We have to be 100 percent correct. It's very devastating to make a mistake to both the family member and the child. We don't want the wrong child to go with the wrong parent," she said.

On claims that child traffickers were making use of the disaster, she said, "People are talking about trafficking, but we don't have any real evidence yet that it's happening."

The first parent and child to be reunified by Save the Children on January 25 was controversial because two families claimed the five-year-old girl as theirs.

After frantic efforts, it was established that one set of claimants had made as mistake.

Lipohar praised the Acehnese for volunteering information about lost children, effectively doing much of the legwork for the aid agencies.

"In some countries people have not wanted to say that they have a child because they've lost their own child. So they want to hang on to the child."

In Aceh, "people have been very clear: They don't want the child to leave the community," she said.