Susie Krabacher's charity, Mercy & Sharing, orchestrates relief work in Haiti. She is pictured in Port-au- Prince in 2004. (Courtesy Mercy & Sharing )

Philanthropist Susie Krabacher just returned from two weeks in Haiti, where she witnessed horrific scenes of dogs gnawing on corpses in the streets, comforted frightened orphans and struggled to find 32 children who disappeared from the abandoned-children unit of the General Hospital.

"We were devastated," said Krabacher, who co-founded an orphanage, hospital and clinic in Haiti with her husband, Joe, through their Aspen-based Mercy & Sharing Foundation.

She and her team barely slept during the days they looked for the missing children, who vanished from a building that was not structurally damaged. They worried that they might have been stolen to sell for adoptions or as slaves.

But on Friday, Krabacher finally learned that 30 of the children had been taken by government workers to another hospital.

Two are still missing.

"There are so many corrupt trafficking issues in Haiti right now," she said Friday. "Now, there is no infrastructure to track children. Many U.S. agencies, and we are one of them, are trying to identify where all the children went."

In Port-au-Prince, the foundation's older orphanage was destroyed, as was its clinic and a school in Cite de Soleil, considered the poorest slum in the Western hemisphere.

The foundation had 146 employees, and about 80 have come back to work. Six died. The others have gone to the provinces to bury their dead. Three students died outside the Cite de Soleil school.

Krabacher said the earthquake hit just as she was planning a dedication ceremony for a new, 27,000-square-foot orphanage in Williamson, 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince.

"We'd invited a lot of senators, ambassadors, major donors and organization heads," said Krabacher. "My director was delivering one of the invitations when the earthquake hit."

The new orphanage was not damaged, but the dedication ceremony was canceled.

Instead, Krabacher called the State Department and offered to house about 100 extra people there, as long as there is financial support to help cover the cost of extra food, fuel, shipping and security.

"It's a very desperate country," said Krabacher. "The riots are just horrific now. We have to protect the little ones and their food."

She expects 100 tons of food to be delivered to Mercy & Sharing warehouses any day, but the logistics are difficult.

"We have no equipment to remove the containers from the trucks," she wrote on her blog, "and bringing in locals to help unload is only going to draw attention to the extremely valuable commodities. Everyone in the community will know where the food is located, and we are going to create security problems."

Just trying to get diesel fuel ended in a tense standoff at the wrong end of a gun.

A gas station in Williamson had just opened, and Krabacher and her team were near the front of the line, filling up 35-gallon drums for their vehicles.

"People were afraid they weren't going to get any gas," she said.

"One of our team got pinned between two cars, nearly ripped his pants off trying to get out, and the owner came out with a gun."

Krabacher is now home in Aspen for a brief break.

She watches CNN constantly, looking for news of Haiti. Her voice is shaky because she's so tired. But she'll head back soon.

"I can't wait to see those sweet children again, and tell them, 'All of America knows who you are, and so does everyone in Colorado. They're going to help,' " she said.