Welcome to Operation Ayiti
Why “Operation Ayiti”? Because “Ayiti” is the Creole spelling for Haiti.
What are we doing? This site is designed as a searchable database allowing you to alleviate the fear associated with not knowing how your loved ones are. Simply search the name of the person you are worried about. If anyone has reported their status, they will be in our database. At the end of each business day, we will transmit the names of those for whom we receive sufficient information to both the Red Cross database and the database of the lost person’s passport country.
If you know of anyone who is safe, you can add them to the database as well. If you add enough information, we can register these people in the ICRC database for you. If we have sufficient information on these individuals, we will upload them to the Red Cross database and the database of the found person’s passport country. PLEASE DO NOT ENTER THE NAMES OF MISSING PERSONS ON THIS LIST!
This website has come about as a result of our efforts to find friends and family with whom we have lost contact as a direct result of the disaster in Haiti. We discovered that our people do not have the ability to contact more than one person, more often than not, that is their spouse or their parent. Some of the “safe” reports we have received are word of mouth. Some people have been named because someone received an email or a text message, others because someone received a phone call or even as a direct result of someone having seen someone else. As a result, many people are aware that an individual is safe, but there is not enough detail or sketchy details preventing said people from being listed in an official database.
To our knowledge there are essentially two groups Internationally collecting information: Foreign Affairs of each of the countries whose citizens were in Haiti either working or on vacation and the International Red Cross. Foreign Affairs only collects the information for their citizens and the International Red Cross is only collecting information on those who have not survived. Unless the ICRC has complete information on the survivors, they will not appear in the Red Cross database.
Which is why we ask you to register your loved ones with our database. We do not pick and choose over the survivors’ nationality or whether or not we have their complete information, or even if we can verify 100% that the individual is safe. It is our intent to give you additional hope that your loved one is indeed still alive so that you can at least function.
For us, the family and loved ones, we would rather deal with sketchy news, than no news, so we have chosen to create this list to give you hope.
If your loved one is listed, does this mean they are safe? Maybe yes, maybe no. We cannot guarantee that your loved one is really safe. Our website is not designed to do that. We are simply allowing people who know people to be safe a database in which to state this knowledge, because nobody else is doing that.
In order to be 100% certain of your loved one’s status we recommend that you contact the Foreign Affairs (drop down to choice of country with links to FA department phone numbers to come soon) department of the passport nation of your loved one (if we have not done that for you) to see if they have listed your loved one. AND contact the ICRC database to search.
Check back here often as people will be adding entries regularly.
We wish you courage
Ayez du courage
Kenbe
The team at Operation Ayiti
