She lies in bed all day, silent and staring vacantly into space. The young girl, barely in her teens, hasn't spoken a word since police handed her over to a home for trafficked women in Nepal's border town of Birgunj. A gentle tap on her shoulder makes her sit up. She puts a hand gingerly on her forehead, her sunken eyes refusing to make contact. It's like staring down a vacuum. No answers.It has been the same since the police found her disoriented near a bus park in Birgunj. "She was brought to us a week ago. She hasn't uttered a word since," says Parvati Khadka, caretaker at the home run by the NGO Maiti Nepal.

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All she had was a bag of clothes. Though there were no identification documents or family details, police inquiries put her name as Kavita Bhatraila, her age as 13 and her home as one of the many thousands in central Nepal's Sindhupalchowk district flattened during the April 25 earthquake.

An estimated 90 per cent of the houses in Sindhupalchowk were damaged in the quake that killed close to 9,000 across Nepal and maimed many thousands more. And Kavita's story of loss and devastation finds repeated echo in the country, with many landing up in cities like Kathmandu and Birgunj, traumatised after losing all that they possessed.

    

(L) Kavita Bhatraila sits close to her only belongings (R) Babies play with a steel glass at the Chinese relief camps - Sai Manish

With UNICEF estimating that 7,000 Nepalese kids land up in factories, hotels and brothels in India every year, trafficking of young girls like Kavita and children, is a major worry for the Nepal government in the aftermath of the quake. Still picking up the pieces from the temblor more than two months ago, the Nepal government has suspended international adoptions for three months and banned the movement of children below the age of 16 without their parents or approved guardians outside their home districts.

"In the name of relief, many people with bad intentions are coming here. Manipulation by criminal elements in this vulnerable situation is easy. It is mandatory to seek our approval if any child is being taken out of the district," says Namuna Bhushal of Nepal's Child Welfare Board (CWB).Orphanages waryAccording to the CWB, 2,038 children were killed in the earthquake and 526 orphaned – 76 having lost both parents; of those who lost one parent, 175 had lost their fathers while 26 fathers are still classified as missing.Requests for admitting kids are on the rise in orphanages across Kathmandu. Shersthang orphanage in the Buddhist enclave of Swaymbhunath in the capital city also received several such requests but turned them down after people who brought the kids failed to produce the parents' death certificates. "We received five requests but we were not sure if they were genuinely orphaned in the earthquake. We are wary of people who separate kids from families," says Methok Sherpa, a supervisor at the orphanage.The government's diktat on the movement of children has police control rooms in Kathmandu buzzing with information about sightings of children with strangers. Officials in the police rooms in Teku and Baneshwar localities in Kathmandu say trafficking calls account for a bulk of their tip-offs.The India casePestalozzi Children's Village, an India-based NGO scouting for children in some of the most devastated parts of Nepal for enrolment, was involved in one such tip-off. According to a police official, 19 children were being taken from Nepal's Dolakha district to Kathmandu for a "screening test" for admission in the NGO's children home in Dehradun, India. Following a tip-off, the Kathmandu police detained them all and filed cases of trafficking against two Indians and four Nepalese who were escorting the children. The arrested men failed to produce approvals for escorting the kids."The boys in their possession were between 9 to 11 years old while the girls were 16 years of age. This was suspicious. They couldn't produce documents even though they had money to pay hotel bills. We arrested them and booked them for trafficking," says deputy superintendent of police Dhan Bahadur Karki.However, Tanya Mowbray of Pestalozzi says in the NGO's defence, "We were carrying out annual selection tests in Kathmandu in order to select economically disadvantaged children and provide them with education in schools in Dehradun, with accommodation in the Pestalozzi Village there."A couple of days after the arrests in May, Gayatri Singh, a Pestalozzi project manager from India landed at the police station to negotiate a release. She had managed to ask Uttarakhand Chief Secretary N. Ravi Shanker and senior BJP MP Karia Munda to write to the Indian embassy in Kathmandu.The letters facilitated the men's release and the children were sent back to their homes in the quake- ravaged town of Lapilang in Dolakha district with their guardians. "We do not know the status of the kids or if they have reached their homes safely. Surviving parents in the devastated areas are sending their children with complete strangers as they cannot afford to raise them anymore," says CWB's Namuna Bhushal.Picture of devastationIt is not difficult to see why. As soon as one crosses the Sun Kosi river at Dholaghat, the signs of destruction along the way to Chautara, the headquarters of Sindhupalchowk district, become evident. Even two months after the earthquake, mud and concrete houses lie in a flattened heap of debris, preserved in their state of original obliteration.House after house in Chautara built precariously along the slopes have collapsed like a pack of cards. With aftershocks now a daily occurrence, the pace of reconstruction is agonizingly slow. There is still no clarity on how many bodies are still buried under the rubble across Sindhupalchowk.In villages like Koleri, in Sindhupalchowk, none of the houses have survived the brunt of the quake. The village which can be reached after walking a mile off the highway is a stark reminder of the precariousness of life in the disaster's aftermath. With houses destroyed, many women bathe bare breasted in the open near the village tank.With large swathes of Nepal ravaged and the task of reconstruction far, far from complete, a 13-year-old too stunned to speak or children from mountain villages roaming the streets of cities and towns are not unusual sights. With Nepal's innocents at their most vulnerable, the task of rebuilding the Himalayan nation might involve saving the survivors of the earthquake once again.

A girl stands outside one of the many homes in Koleri district that reduced to a pile of bricks by the Earthquake in Nepal - Sai ManishNo home to return toRelief camps, childcare homes and orphanages are overflowing with women and young children rooted out of their homes with no place to return to. A camp in Bode in Kathmandu valley run by Chinese activists is one of them.Close to 1,100 people, most of them women and children, from Sindhupalchowk were brought to the camp. Chameli Vika, 24, was pregnant when she was rescued and brought here from her village of Tatopan. She delivered a girl in the relief camp but wasn't lactating despite repeated attempts to breastfeed her baby. Luckily, the Bode camp had an abundant supply of Lactogen. "I do not have any money. My village has been completely destroyed. My husband was working as a porter and has gone to look for a job in Terai," says Chameli as she gently cradles her month old baby named Maya."There are over 300 children in this camp alone. Many have been orphaned and are with their guardians. We can take care of them till the monsoon lasts. The Nepal government will have to step up after that," says Wang Peng, the supervisor of the Chinese relief camp."The ground keeps shaking and entire mountain slopes have collapsed in my village. But I would want to go back with my family once we have money," says Chameli.