Florida Man Builds Network to Connect Haitian Quake Victims, Loved Ones Around the Globe

Marvin Chery was sitting in his car heading home from work on Tuesday when a friend’s tweet alerted him to the earthquake in Haiti.

“I got a tweet from a friend in Haiti that said something like ‘Major earthquake, lots of damage,’ said Chery, who is from Haiti and now lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. “The first thing I did was pull over and try to make some calls for about 30 minutes, looking for news on my phone, or the radio, but nothing was really available yet.”

Chery’s family–his father, grandmother, and two uncles–live near Port-Au-Prince in a community called Delmas. He went home, kept calling, and turned on CNN for more information. He continued to see sporadic tweets from friends in Haiti and others in the US, but he didn’t know the full gravity of the damage until a breaking news alert appeared. He was stunned at the images and began calling even more to no avail, all night and into the next day.

“The next day, Wednesday morning, I was still trying to make some calls, and I began to look online because I really wanted to know how to get in touch with people there with all the communication lines down,” he said. He started looking for sites to register people or leave messages, but most were also covering other stories and not completely focused on Haiti, so he took matters into his own hands.

A few months ago Chery, who works as a photographer and freelance web designer, bought the domain name koneksyon.com, for another project he wanted to build–a social network for the Haitian community. The word koneksyon is the word “connection” in Creole. He also already knew about Vanilla, a streamlined open-source forum builder, that would be easy for most people to use, and decided to start his network right away to help the people of Haiti locate their friends and family around the world.

“I used a basic script, I didn’t write any coding, and some of the things I couldn’t do, so I called my friend and asked him to help me. In less than an hour, the website was launched.”

Since the site went up Wednesday afternoon, nearly 2,500 people have signed on to share information and look for family and friends. The messages are both uplifting and heartbreaking; while a few people have reported back that they’ve been able to find their missing loved ones, many more messages are pouring in looking for mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and kids. In many cases entire families are missing.

Chery has also not heard from his family yet, and the news he has heard about the area is saddening.

“I’ve heard many things, and none of them are positive.  Five minutes before I talked to you, I got a tweet that said there is no house standing in Delmas,” Chery said.

This morning he sent a text to make a donation to the American Red Cross, and is encouraging people to give there or to Yele Haiti, the organization run by Wyclef Jean.

“It really takes the pain away to see that people are helping, but not being able to get in touch with your loved ones is so hard.”