IN a filthy destitute village, half an hour outside Rangoon, three-year-old Than Than Nues was dumped days after Cyclone Nargis had ravaged her home in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta and made her an orphan.

The toddler, who lost both her parents when 12ft waves swept through their home in Bogalay, a coastal township, was carted off in a government lorry and handed over to strangers. Villagers, who struggled to feed their own families from their meagre rice paddies or from working in a factory on a daily wage of just 75p, were forced to provide for the extra mouths.

Last week underfed children played in the mud-filled main street, still trying to forget the traumatic night in May when they saw their closest relatives swept to their deaths.

“If she stays here her future is bleak. She’d be much better off with her older brother,” said U Saw Hein, the village leader, as his daughter bounced the child on her knee.

“We discovered that he’s 18 and working near Mandalay. He doesn’t know she’s alive. We really want to get them back together, but we barely have enough to survive on and the bus fare to Mandalay is £5. We just can’t afford it,” he said.

With the delta infrastructure destroyed there are no telephones - even if the desperately poor farmers could afford to call. The only way to reach people is to go and meet them.

Than Than Nues was one of several children found by The Sunday Times who had been displaced close to the devastated delta region. They had become separated from their families first by the force of nature, then by the price of a bus fare, and had little chance of being reunited.

In another bleak village half an hour from Bogalay, which Burma’s paranoid government keeps hidden behind military checkpoints, four-year-old twins Ma Nu Nu and Ma Su Su took shelter from a torrential downpour with other severely undernourished children.

There was no way to tell what memories the quiet little girls had of their mother who was wrenched from them during the cyclone, or of their father who was working near the Thai border, unaware that his daughters had survived.

Although the villagers knew where to find him, the cost of the three-day journey to the border was beyond their means. The best they could do was to care for the girls as if they were their own.

About 54% of the 138,000 cyclone victims were children. Aid agencies such as Save the Children and Unicef believe there could be as many as 2,000 children still separated from their families. In an effort to save them from being forced into crammed orphanages, the charities are setting up a tracing system to help to reunite them.

Out of 800 children officially registered by international agencies as “separated and unaccompanied”, 45 have been reunited with close relatives. The process could take up to two years.

“Entire families were swept away and it impacted on children more than anybody,” said Guy Cave, head of child protection at Save the Children in Rangoon. The tracing system, which was used after the Asian tsunami in 2004, registers lost children on a database and sends local workers to remote villages to track down surviving relatives.

The system has saved two sisters, Ma Thin Thin, 13, and Ma Lin Lin, 15, from being dumped in a grim state-run orphanage. They were an hour from home in Laputta township when the cyclone struck. They survived by clinging onto hay bales throughout the night, finding themselves stranded on a small patch of dry land the next day.

A boat took them to the Wakema shelter, where the girls were immediately registered as orphans.

Save the Children workers tracked down their parents in a village 1½ hours away, prompting their father to try to travel to the camp to collect them. He was stopped from travelling by the authorities and the girls were moved yet again to a shelter in Myaung Mya, four hours’ drive away. “We cried a lot when we were sent to Myaung Mya and separated from our father,” said Ma Lin Lin.

Meanwhile, Daw Su Myat, 38, their mother, had been mourning the loss of her children. “Around 20 of my close relatives died in the storm. I thought my two daughters were also dead,” she said.

“About six days after the cyclone we got news that they were alive and in a shelter. But we weren’t allowed to take them back and I was afraid that someone else would adopt them.”

After Save the Children intervened, the authorities relented and allowed the girls to return to their parents.

Tracking scattered families is further complicated by large population movements and unpredictable government decisions that force the closure of refugee camps or relocate people at random. Some villages remain flattened and young children often have no idea where they come from. Villages have not been identified by The Sunday Times for fear of government interference.

The charities say their main aim is to keep children out of the harsh, institutional life found in state-run or monastic institutions where children are crammed together on bamboo mats and forced to rise at dawn and beg on the street.

They face a race against time after a government decision to build six more orphanages in the delta region. In one institution in Rangoon, more than 20 children had arrived since the cyclone struck. Only two girls, aged 12 and 13, were orphans. The others have at least one surviving parent. A sad four-year-old boy sat in the corner. His mother had died and his father could not afford to keep him.

Aid workers described howa young girl was sent to an orphanage in the north of the country just a day before her parents discovered the village where she was taking refuge. It is not known whether they found her.

Aid agencies say they want to support families to allow them to keep their children at home. “I can’t stress enough that institutions should be a last resort,” said Christina Torsein, a child protection specialist with Unicef.

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