Refugees United
My first thought when I heard about this organization was “Why couldn’t we have had something like this in the 1990’s?”. A fast way of finding lost family and friends who had ended up on the other side of the world, as it often happens during wars. We had the Red Cross who would try to find people for us and even to send letters, but I rarely saw this work. There are still plenty of people from my childhood I never got back in touch with.
In the Internet era things work differently. Now there’s Refugees United, a non-profit, non-political, non-religious NGO, which runs a platform where refugees can search for their friends and relatives - for free. By registering with nicknames, scars, former locations and other markers only identifiable to family and close friends, everyone can remain ‘invisible’ to all but those who know them.
The organization was formed in 2005 by the Danish brothers David and Christopher T. Mikkelsen, after they met a young Afghan refugee named Mansour; a man desperately seeking his siblings and parents lost to him at the age of 12 while escaping from the Taliban regime. It turned out that his entire family had been scattered all across the world, and to this day they only had luck to find one of his brothers.
“Our aim is to provide a global, anonymous and dedicated refugee network, to end the torture of not knowing where relatives are in this world,” the founders say. “We do this, because after we brought the two brothers together in Afghanistan, we realized the unnecessary hardship many refugees must endure to find family.”
You can help Refugees United by telling the world, supporting the cause on Facebook, by informing refugees of the service, by volunteering your skills - all help is welcome.
For those who read Danish: the organization was featured in the daily Politiken on November 16th and another feature is coming up on the 23rd 
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