Red Cross Blogs

Video: reuniting Haitian families

By Katrina Crew
February 22, 2010 at 2:30 pm

You’ve seen the pictures on the news: men and women wearing the red cross as they dig survivors out of earthquake rubble. Haitian Red Cross volunteers working alongside experts from around the world to build latrines and sanitation systems.

But there’s someone else the Red Cross does that can be difficult to show in a news story. After disasters, we help families get back in touch with each other.

Imagine all the ways you communicate with your family – email, phone, text, instant message. Now imagine all those systems were down, or busy because everyone else was using them, too. Imagine your computer and phones were buried under several feet of rubble. What would you do?

From our founding 150 years ago, reconnecting families has been one of the most important ways we help conflict and disaster survivors.

In the case of the Haiti earthquake, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) set up a website where survivors could register themselves as safe and well. Families look at the names on the Family Links website in the hopes their loved ones will be there. Volunteers from the Haitian Red Cross have been walking through camps registering people and helping them call family members.

This video shows how it works and ends with one of the most heart-warming images I’ve seen come out of the disaster.

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Tags: emergency response, finding missing family, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, haiti earthquake appeal, itms, video

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Emergencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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