Strangers help Canadians find loved ones abroad

Desperate to find out whether her son Ryan was still alive, Lynne Robertson made her way Wednesday to a CIBC branch in downtown Winnipeg with his credit-card number in hand, ready to beg for any scrap of information the bank might have to show that he had survived the deadly tsunamis.

She hoped the branch could tell her whether the card had been used since Sunday, when the massive waves bashed the coasts of a dozen countries, killing tens of thousands of people. The answer was no. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's privacy policy could not be overridden.

But she persisted, until a woman on the other end of a customer help line, with a son about the same age, heard the agony of a worried mother. "I begged and cried, and begged and cried," Ms. Robertson said.

The CIBC employee gave Ms. Robertson a snippet of hope: Ryan's card had been used, after the tsunamis, in a relatively unscathed area of Thailand. It was enough to sustain Ms. Robertson and her husband for the next two days, until Ryan was finally able to contact them by telephone early yesterday.

The chaos left behind after the tsunamis receded has disrupted the normal lines of communication and has left people like Ms. Robertson scrambling to find a way to reach relatives and friends in the disaster zone. In doing so, they have made an unexpected kind of connection: to the compassion and sometimes cruelty, of their fellow humans.

When Jenny Oad of Toronto heard that tsunamis had battered Sri Lanka, her first thought was for the safety of her neighbours, Joachim and Mary Xavier, and their daughter Chris, all vacationing there in the now-devastated island nation. After trying and failing to get information over the phone from the federal government, she turned to the Internet, posting an electronic message on CNN's website.

The responses she got showed her the best and the worst of human nature. The worst came first. Someone sent a nasty computer virus in an e-mail entitled, "Your next vacation is going to be your own personal tsunami in India." That virus wiped out her computer's software and data, just as she was hoping to get help over the Web in her attempt to contact the Xaviers. "It was just pure mean," Ms. Oad said.

But she said her faith in humanity was restored after her computer was repaired, and she saw other responses to her CNN message, leaving her to marvel at the willingness of Sri Lankans to help in her search for her neighbours. Her electronic plea for help generated 20 answers, including one from a Sri Lankan news agency telling her people there had read her message, and from a cellphone company that offered to track the Xaviers using the trail left by their mobile phone.

In Tillsonburg, Ont., near London, Dianne Wallace encountered the same generosity of spirit through the impersonal medium of e-mail. A computer novice, Ms. Wallace still managed to contact a Thai travel agent, Chutima Diskum, in an electronic chatroom while trolling on-line for any shred of information she could find about her sister and niece, Darlene and Tracey Greer. The two had planned to backpack through Thailand, including Phi Phi Island, a resort area ravaged by the tsunamis.

Even though Ms. Wallace was a stranger, Ms. Diskum embarked on an extensive search for the two Canadian women. Ms. Diskum helped her to translate reports about the injured and dead that are being posted regularly on-line by Thai hospitals, and even called Thai hotels to check for her missing relatives.

"She's really been keeping me going, especially by the places she has been trying to check," Ms. Wallace said. "It's been quite an ordeal getting information."

Beyond having depended on the generosity of strangers, Ms. Oad and Ms. Wallace have one other thing in common with Ms. Robertson. Their stories all have happy endings: the son, neighbours, sister and niece have survived.