On the reunification of families through the Internet (Good deed of the day #2)
Oriana, a medical student from Colombia, is staying with us for a couple of weeks, while waiting for her apartment to become available. She contacted us because my email appears on the Yale Mexican Student Organization website. She is doing a residence in psychiatry in a New Haven hospital.
At the hospital, she came upon a patient, which I’ll refer to as José. He only spoke Spanish, and no one at the hospital could communicate with him without an interpreter until Oriana arrived. He was found in a nearby city, and he didn’t really know how he got there. He said that all of his close relatives were dead. Despite his problem with remembering recent events, he knew his name, the names of his parents, his hometown, and his school.
When Oriana asked us if we had any suggestions about how to track down someone in Mexico, the first thing that came to my mind was the web, of course. By searching through the Mexican white pages (available online), as well as various government websites such as SEP (Ministry of Education), INEGI (Population and Statistics), and SEPOMEX (Postal Service), we managed to find his parents, which were perfectly alive, and verify all the details. After a few phone calls Oriana could reconstruct part of José’s history and locate other relatives in the U.S. (all of them were alive, by the way). I hope all this will lead to him being reunited with his family. A series of coincidences led Oriana here, and the Web helped save the day!