&${esc.hash}39; When you have family abroad, you dread the phone call with bad news in the middle of the night.
But when your faraway hometown has been struck by an earthquake, not getting that phone call is even more unbearable.
With families around the world worried about their relatives in areas of northern Pakistan and India struck by a massive earthquake that officials say has killed more than 20,000 people, a Red Cross website aims to put survivors in touch.
Phone lines are often blocked and down, and it is hard to locate people who are living in the street, in shelters or with friends. Even when telephones are working, international calls are often prohibitively expensive.
The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has decades of experience reuniting families separated by war, has set up a website to link earthquake survivors with families abroad, in other parts of the country, or people who may be in the same area but lost each other in the upheaval of destruction.
The FamilyLinks website is in English, and guides users in simple steps how to register the names of people not accounted for.
Alternatively, survivors can register themselves as safe and give details of how to get in touch by going to local red Cross Red crescent offices.
The ICRC says information from the website will be posted in public places and broadcast by radio for people with no access to the Internet.
Vincent Lusser, press officer for the ICRC in Geneva, said the humanitarian organisation could also help link relatives divided by the India-Paksitan border that cuts through Kashmir.
&${esc.hash}39;People come with these needs right from the beginning,&${esc.hash}39; he said. &${esc.hash}39;At the same time as they ask for blankets and tents, they will also ask to get information to their relatives.
&${esc.hash}39;This has been a very unhappy year for the world. This is the third time this year we have had to set up a special website for a natural catastrophe.&${esc.hash}39;
The ICRC set up similar websites after the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed about 230,000 people across a huge swathe of Asia and part of Africa at the end of 2004, and Hurricane Katrina, which struck the southeastern United States on Aug. 29, killing about 2,000 people and leaving thousands more homeless.
Northern Pakistan has a massive diaspora in countries such as Britain and Canada.
Adeel Jafferi of Islamic Relief, an aid organisation in the British midlands town of Birmingham, said: &${esc.hash}39;The greatest percentage of people who live in Britain who are originally from Pakistani origin are from the area that was worst hit, so naturally they&${esc.hash}39;re going to be concerned.&${esc.hash}39;
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