Madge Bray's journey home to Edinburgh from Georgia on Tuesday was fraught with danger, delays and bureaucratic bungling. She was driven to Tbilisi airport by a Georgian friend from Tokliauri, the tiny Kakhetian village east of Gori in which she is helping build a children's refuge. But Tbilisi was deemed too dangerous because of rumours that the airport was about to be taken by the Russians.

A frantic overnight drive in the opposite direction to Yerevan airport in Armenia ensued, only to be met by long queues at the border full of foreign nationals desperate to leave. Misinformation from the British Embassy about fees, passport photographs and forms created confusion and fear. She was open-mouthed to hear the British Embassy's answerphone advice: "Yerevan airport will be congested; maybe best to avoid it." Finally she made it home, safe and sound.

But she feels no relief. Pacing the rooms of her large flat near Bruntsfield, and listening to a recording of the music of her beloved adopted country, Bray is battling a rising anxiety and a desperate desire to return. "My experience was as nothing compared to what my friends in Georgia are going through," she begins. "Refugees from Gori are pouring into Tokliauri by the minute. My friend Nana has taken some of them in, and they are all living in one room, but her house has no roof and they are already starving. Food prices are soaring - a loaf of bread is £5.

"Nana's niece's house in Gori was bombed and she, her family and many others lived in the cellar for three days during the bombing. The Georgian army sent in 50 reservists to protect them, but they were only kids with small guns, so they took them into the cellar to hide, too. What can you do with a gun when they are dropping bombs? When people fled they were strafed as they crossed bridges. So they hid in the bushes and made a run for it. But Nana's niece is afraid to be in Tokliauri because it's a place where British volunteers come and it could be the next target. You can't trust the Russians. Nana's niece's husband's mother is Ossetian and her father is Georgian. Putin says he's trying to protect Ossetians. Who is Putin trying to protect her husband from? Himself?"

You can feel the terror almost by osmosis. "I've been on the phone to another friend, also called Nana, every half hour since I arrived back home. She had to travel through Tbilisi and Gori yesterday Wednesday 13 to collect her children who were on holiday in Guria, which is on the other side. There's only one road, so going through the occupied areas is unavoidable. She was absolutely terrified - because she had to go through again with the children.

"She made it, but she told me Russian soldiers and bands of people are roaming around in the villages with guns, looting and killing people.

"She said nobody is left in Gori. As she went through the checkpoint Russian soldiers were taunting her and poking their guns in her face. She felt that if she'd looked at them the wrong way they'd have shot her.

"The soldiers shouted out in English to see who would respond. She told me she was praying I wouldn't phone her at that point because she'd have had to speak to me in English. It is all very sinister. They fear the Russians will put land mines everywhere before they leave and there are rumours they are already land-mining Gori."

Bray's sense of frustration is palpable. The 56-year-old social worker from Dunoon has devoted her life to caring for abused children. She is a devotee of the power of vibrational therapy, or singing, to heal traumatised children and in 2001 was nominated as European Woman of the Year for her work in Eastern Europe. But she had to cut short her visit to Georgia last week because of the conflict in the Caucasus. "I didn't want to leave, but my friends thought I would be of more use if I could return and tell people what is going on."

She is currently helping develop a village-based family foster care project for the country's thousands of orphanage children. She is working with the Georgian charity Mamatsi Guli (Heart of the Brave) to modernise the moribund institutionalised system - a legacy of the old Soviet regime which, she says, regarded vulnerable children as "vermin". There are at least 5000 children in Georgia's orphanages, plus at least 2500 living on the streets.

It was music that first brought Bray to Georgia. In 1989 she had founded SACCS, an organisation to offer therapeutic help to abused children. This work took her to Russia and to Bosnia - where she was invited to sing outside the Omarska concentration camp. Then four years ago she attended a Georgian polyphonic sound workshop in Edinburgh and went on to learn more about this music's spiritual healing power.

"When I heard the music, I knew it had a contribution to make to society," she says. "I thought they must be using it in Georgia, and went there to find out. I found the only person to use it as therapy was an extraordinary man called Ghia Razmadze, who was running a children's refuge in Tbilisi. He was healing these vagabond, feral children with song and supra (prayer)."

One of the children cared for by Razmadze is now Georgia's human rights ombudsman. Bray is working with both men at the Mamatsi Guli village, whose primary aim is to promote the wellbeing of children in Georgia whose families are unable to offer them adequate care and protection.

Seven-year-old Datuna, who lives in a dank, overcrowded orphanage in the village of Grami, is a tragic example of the desperate results of poverty and oppression. He is paralysed from the waist down because his mother deliberately threw him out of a seventh-floor window to cripple him in the belief he could help her beg. Neighbours intervened and took him to hospital, where he spent two years. Thanks to poor sanitary conditions he now has a life-threatening necrotic wound on his back.

"Georgia is poor in everything but love," she says. "Many parents can't afford to care for their children and there is neither paediatric care nor child protection legislation. There is no foster care system. If a baby is found in a dustbin it's sent to the Baby House where it lives in a cot and is fed by rote and where they learn not to cry and grow up silent."

Tbilisi's Baby House orphanage has 145 babies and it is running desperately short of staff and food for the children. "In this country that I love so much, social exclusion of its most vulnerable, which came with the Communists, cuts deep," she says.

Bray believes Georgia was getting to its feet but that Russia is now systematically destroying its fragile infrastructure so it can't function as a democratic country.

Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian President, plans to close down the orphanages this year as part of his fledgling democracy's policy to deinstitutionalise vulnerable children, but has not the means, the legislation nor the infrastructure to do it. "Georgia is struggling on all levels to get its human rights issues sorted out, because it wants to become part of Nato," says Bray.

On Thursday, Bray received a text message from Nika Kvashli, president of the TEMI charity for the disadvantaged which fosters three Ossetian and four Russian children as well as children from many other nationalities.

Breaking his self-imposed silence about the conflict, he wrote: "Our children have never experienced chauvinism of any kind and over the years they have all been treated equally. But some of their missiles didn't explode; they had hand-written inscriptions on them that said, For America, for Nato'."

Bray's reaction is immediate. "These children are already disadvantaged. They don't have parents to care for them. Unless they're in good hands they're likely to be at the highest risk. Hundreds more children will be displaced by this war. If there are no staff to look after them and there is no food for them to eat, what will happen to them?"

How you can help Madge Bray is desperate to return to Georgia to continue her work with vulnerable children, but she needs funds to do so. You can help by sending a donation as a cheque made payable to Ecologia Youth Trust (marked "Mamatsi Guli" on the back) to: Ecologia Youth Trust, 66 The Park, Forres, Moray IV36 3TD. Or you could donate as a bank transfer to account number 00210205, sort code 83-20-14 (Royal Bank of Scotland, Forres, Moray).