“The first challenge is to find out if (the) children’s parents live somewhere and if they are trying to reunite them,” she told The Associated Press, speaking at a school in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

Since the earthquake, the school has turned into a shelter for families who have lost their homes.

In Turkey, Derya Yanik, the minister of family affairs, said on Wednesday that more than 1,800 “unaccompanied children” have been reunited with their families since the earthquake. Attempts were made to identify 83 other children and reunite them with relatives, Yanik said.

Some of the children who have not been identified were still in intensive care in hospitals in Turkey, she added, and more than 350,000 families had registered to foster children orphaned by the quake.

The earthquake between Turkey and Syria killed at least 50,000 people and injured many more, according to the UN. Tens of thousands are still missing and hundreds of thousands are homeless. In Syria, a total of at least 6,000 people were killed, both in government-controlled areas and in rebel-held territory in the northwest of the country. That region, held by Syrian rebels, is home to 4.6 million people, many of whom were previously displaced by the war in Syria, and which was worst affected in Syria,

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and a pre-war financial center, witnessed some of the fiercest fighting in the nearly 12-year conflict that killed at least 300,000 people and displaced half of its 23 million population.

The quake further destroyed thousands of homes in Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria and decimated infrastructure as medical groups sounded the alarm about possible health crises breaking out in earthquake-hit areas.

“We have to make sure that children continue their education and that is very difficult,” Russell also told the AP.

Nearly a month after the earthquake, many families are still living in schools, mosques, churches and other makeshift shelters after their homes were destroyed. At the same time, Russel fears that if children spend a long period of time in places like the school that has now become a shelter in Aleppo, children will fall behind in their education.

UNICEF holds a number of classes in such shelters so that children “don’t drop out of school early”.

“We have to keep children in education and that is very difficult,” she added.

Also on Wednesday, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited the rebel-held northwest and crossed into Syria from Turkey to address the needs of those affected by the quake.

Ghebreyesus’s visit to Syria was the second following a tour of the northern city of Aleppo last month following the earthquake.

“Even before the earthquake, needs were increasing, while international aid was declining,” Ghebreyesus said at a news conference. “I call on the leaders of both sides of the Syrian conflict to use the shared suffering of this crisis as a platform for peace.”

Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut contributed to this report.