Banda Aceh – Some parents in tsunami-ravaged Aceh province are still clinging to hopes for a miracle, placing photos of smiling children in newspapers on the chance they might still be alive.

"It might just jog someone's memory," said Amiruddin, a civil servant who ran an ad in Saturday's Serambi Indonesia with a picture of his two children under a headline that simply reads"Searching For."

"I have a really strong feeling inside me that they will one day come home," he said.

One year after the tsunami slammed into Aceh's coastline, leaving 167,000 people dead or missing, that outcome is now more unlikely than ever.

Only 58 separated children have been reunited with parents since the Dec. 26 disaster, and just two such reunions have occurred since July, according to the UN's child agency.

Amiruddin and others who still run the ads hold out hope that their children may have lost their memories due to post-traumatic shock, or were too young to know their address when the tsunamistruck, and have been taken in by other families.

They also believe that their children may have been smuggled out of the province by professional gangs that were widely reported to have been targeting the province in the days after the disaster. The UN's child agency says there's no evidence this ever occurred.

Trauma counselors in the province attribute the phenomena to the fact that so few of those killed by the tsunami in Aceh were ever identified and given a formal burial.

When the giant waves retreated, they sucked countless bodies back to sea, and tens of thousands of other corpses were hurriedly buried in mass graves in the days after the disaster.

"If they have seen no evidence their child is dead, they will have trouble accepting it," said Amin Khoja, a social worker from the American Red Cross, which is training local counselors to help the survivors and bereaved.

Khoja, who worked in the aftermath of the Gujarat earthquake, said it can take three or four years for some bereaved people to accept their loss.

Despite individual cases, most counselors working in Aceh say the survivors and bereaved are coping remarkably well – something they attribute to the region's strong community and religious ties.

Amiruddin, a 45-year-old civil servant, and his wife Yasrati have had no counseling since the disaster. They have renovated their badly damaged home, and now live there again with their one remaining son.

Yasrati still believes her two children are alive because she frequently dreams about them.