UCH employee fears 11 family members in Haiti are dead

Rose Millien held on to the hope that her loved ones in Haiti survived.

Now it's slipping away, she said, since the hours without word from at least one of her relatives have stretched out into days.

"I feel like I'm going crazy," Millien, a nurse technician at University Community Hospital-Carrollwood, said. "This is very hard for me. Very hard."

She fears at least 11 family members in the capital, Port-au-Prince, are dead.

A 26-year-old niece worked in the presidential palace there, she said. She's afraid her niece perished when the palace was destroyed in the quake, Millien said. Haitian President Rene Preval was the only person who escaped the building unharmed.

"I can't find nobody," Millien said of her more than 30 relatives in Haiti. "I don't know where they are. I just want to hear about them. Even if they have died."

Millien's ordeal and uncertainty played out countless times among the roughly 800,000 people in the United States of Haitian descent desperate for any morsel of information about loved ones. Feverish calls, texts and e-mails largely go unanswered as the distraught try to muster a reason to hope as bodies pile up on Haiti's streets.

Some people, like Marcus Smith of Tampa, posted photographs of his missing father on Web sites to generate information.

"I'm hoping things work out for the best," Smith said. "I'm just trying to stay positive, but I'm just in the dark."

Also missing is his father's wife and 4-year-old sister. The family traveled to Haiti on Monday to get their property and belongings in order before permanently moving to Florida, Smith said.

"My dad's a very religious man," Smith said. "He'll be the brave one. He'll do what he can."

Smith said he had confirmation on Thursday that one of his relatives - an aunt - was alive, but seriously injured. His aunt broke her arms and legs after she jumped out of a window to escape a collapsing building, Smith said.

Communication lines and power were still down two days after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake rattled the island nation. Tampa residents with ties to Haiti also turned to e-mails, text messages and social networking sites to get information about relatives and friends.

"The best way to communicate is through the Internet," Judith Lamadieu-Tuffet, the president of the Haitian Association Foundation of Tampa, said.

Lamadieu-Tuffet said association members and residents of Tampa's sizeable Haitian community have told her that they have received news of relatives through Facebook and other sites.

Many told her they've lost loved ones to the disaster, she said.

Lamadieu-Tuffet could not reach her family or friends today and said she was starting to worry.

"Now it's more like reality is setting in," she said.

Smith and Millien said Haiti is an impoverished country that can't seem to recover from government corruption, violence and past hurricanes. The earthquake made things worse.

"In Haiti, there's always trouble," Millien said. "Always, always trouble all the time. This is the worst now."

Millien said she first heard about the disaster while she was working on Tuesday night. A co-worker told her that Haiti was on the evening news. Millien thought her homeland was hit by a hurricane.

When the devastation wrought by the quake snapped into focus, Millien said she rushed out, bought pre-paid phone cards and began calling a list of more than 30 names.

Millien, who's lived in Tampa for seven years, said that she plans to keep making those calls. She declined to speak in detail about her mother, sisters, brothers and cousins.

"I still miss my country," she said. "I would like to go there now and try to help those people. Not only my family. But everybody."