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I've seen how 'community-based care' can work in many places. In Cambodia, like in India, Kenya, Brazil ... pick a country, any country ... it often means children falling under the 'care' of those organizing begging rings or owners of brothels or arranging for mine workers, rug tiers ... what ever.

The UN is talking about "reintegrating children into communities", as if the orphanages that have been caring for the kids are on another planet, instead smack-dab in the center of neighborhoods.

AOA, the orphanage where my kids were cared for, is in a village. When they're old enough, the orphanage kids go to the village school, play with the village kids, and many of the women of the village make a living working at AOA. Is there any way the AOA children could be absorbed into the community any more than they already are? Could they find homes with the village families, or those of neighboring villages? Seeing as how poor the village people are and how many children they already have, and that neighboring villages also have orphanages, I don't see how.

But as an Italian woman who opened an orphanage in Mozambique in 1991 understands only too well, "The government and UNICEF don't like children in institutions anymore," she explains. "They want to have children in communities."

At her orphanage, ASEM, Jorge Tarquino is now working to shift children out and into communities.

"Reintegration – it's the biggest difficulty," Mr. Tarquino says.

In addition to locating relatives or willing neighbors to take in an orphan, it is his job to make sure those families have the means to care for the child.

ASEM has set up a slew of projects to help with this support – vocational training centers, counseling groups, food assistance. But it is not easy to monitor an orphan's situation in the community, Tarquino says. He tells a story of how a group of colleagues spent four days looking for a family to deliver two days' worth of food.

Anyone else seeing the huge gaps kids must be falling though by the thousands in this picture?

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