The Power

THE POWER OF INTERNETLast April 14, 2010, Eyjafjalla Glacier in southern Iceland April 14, 2010 erupted. Millions of travelers, including myself were stranded, or otherwise inconvenienced, by the cloud of volcanic ash that shut down much of Europe’s airspace for nearly a week. I picked up a story about how the internet can help, but few, if any, in as much worried as myself at that moment, on a foreign place as Mrs. Sofia Atila Kafu. And this is the story.

At 64, Mrs. Sofia Atila Kafu had never been outside Kenya. She had never been on a plane, never even seen the inside of an airport, and she spoke only Swahili and Luhya. She had left home with less than €20 in cash, about US$25, and her cellphone worked only in Kenya.

Ms. Agnes Mwangale, her youngest child, was graduating from college, the first of Ms. Kafu’s 12 children to do so. Trouble was, the ceremony was in Nova Scotia, at St. Francis Xavier University, and she was thousands of kilometers away, with no direct flights between Kenya and North America. But Ms. Mwangale was determined that her mother attend.

Ms. Kafu, a devoutly Catholic widow, would say later that she had put her faith in God when she set out from her village, Kipkaren. But when nature saw fit to unleash a major disaster in the middle of her journey, stranding her inside the disorder at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam it was a network of strangers, energized by a desperate message put out on the Internet, that came to her rescue.

By the time Ms. Mwangale, who had undertaken her own time-consuming trip to meet her mother in Toronto, arrived there at 6 p.m. She was looking at the arrivals board at Toronto airport, April 15. Cancelled, Cancelled, Cancelled, it reads. Ms. Kafu had been at Schiphol for nearly 19 hours. Ms. Mwangale made several calls to agents at KLM, trying to find just one who would go “beyond the call of duty,” as she put it.

But everyone told her that there was too much chaos at Schiphol, and too many stranded passengers to go looking for one in particular. They could not make a special announcement. The agents said the mother would have to be the one to call Ms. Mwangale, but unless someone helped her, how could she? Ms. Kafu had never used a pay phone before.

CANCELLED

Ms. Kafu did have some papers with her daughter’s number and instructions, in bright red, to help her call in case of an emergency. But so far, no call had been received.

After several hours, Ms. Mwangale made her way to the hotel room where she and her mother had intended to spend the night. But she couldn’t sleep, knowing that her mother was sitting alone somewhere in a big foreign airport that had gone into crisis mode. So she watched the news and stayed awake all night— just as her mother always did when Ms. Mwangale was flying home for a visit. “I was in very low spirits,” she said.

The next morning, more calls. Ms. Mwangale finally managed to reach Peter Kuria, an administrative attaché in the Kenyan Embassy in The Hague. He promised to drive to Amsterdam on Saturday morning if no one had found her mother by then.

Luckily, Ms. Mwangale had help in her campaign. From Boston, her longtime friend and academic sponsor, Paula Donovan, was calling everyone she could think of. Her colleagues from the advocacy organization AIDS-Free World — several of whom had helped make the mother’s trip a reality in the first place, donating frequent-flier miles, booking flights and hotels — also joined in, from Toronto, New York and San Francisco.

But by around 1 p.m. April 16 in Toronto — about 38 hours after Ms. Kafu had landed in Amsterdam — everyone was feeling a little desperate. So Ms. Donovan sent an e-mail blast to her colleagues: “Urgently need your networking help!” read the subject line.

After recounting Ms. Kafu’s plight, the e-mail message begged: “Do you know anyone who’s stranded in Amsterdam, or know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone whose Facebook friends or Twitter followers might be there?”

People began forwarding the message, which asked to be put in contact with “any kind soul” willing “to talk to us and then search for Sophia.” It took only about two hours for the network to work its magic.

Ms. Donovan’s e-mailed plea went to an AIDS-Free World employee in San Francisco. Within minutes it was on its way to a lawyer in Washington, to another lawyer in the same firm, to that lawyer’s father, a senior executive at Delta Airlines, a KLM partner, and then to another Delta executive in Atlanta.

Two hours after the initial e-mail message was sent — at 9:30 p.m. Amsterdam time — George Bougias, Delta’s regional manager for customer service, got a message on his BlackBerry while having dinner with his wife.

Suspicious that the whole thing might be an elaborate Internet prank, Mr. Bougias called the cellphone number listed in the e-mail message.

Ms. Mwangale answered.

Hallo???!!!!

“She was very worried,” Mr. Bougias said. “And she said, ‘Please, please, yes, it’s a true story, help me out!”’

Mr. Bougias asked Ms. Mwangale to send him some photos of her mother. When the pictures popped up on his BlackBerry a few minutes later, Mr. Bougias told her that he was on his way.

By 10:40 p.m., he had deployed six security agents to comb the terminals. It wasn’t going to be easy: About 2,000 people were camping out in Schiphol, and most of them were now asleep.

Shortly thereafter, they were joined by another team of searchers: Jacqueline Wittebrood, who had received an e-mail message from an associate in New York, and her friend Fezekile Kuzwayo, who speaks Swahili.

Just before midnight, the two women and the security agent accompanying them had finished scouring one terminal, to no avail. They were on their way to join the search group led by Mr. Bougias when the agent suggested that they check the relatively isolated area around the airport casino.

There, they found two women lying on cots under blankets. One was African, but too young — maybe 40. But perhaps the other one?

“Mama Sophia?” Ms. Kuzwayo called. And then, in Swahili: “We’ve been sent here by your daughter.”

The woman smiled and the search party saw the gap in her teeth, just like the ones in the photos that Ms. Mwangale had sent. Her mother was rattled but O.K. The other woman, a Congo native who lives in Toronto and spoke English, had connected with her after their flight was canceled. (She said that she tried to call Ms. Mwangale on Thursday but that the number did not work.)

Four days later, after being taken care of by Delta and then put on a plane once the ash had cleared, mother was reunited with daughter late Tuesday night at Halifax airport, in Nova Scotia. Ms. Mwangale said she was so giddy that her head hurt. Her mother nearly lost her voice. They stayed up talking and laughing in their hotel room until 4 a.m.

Ms. Kafu is looking forward to seeing her daughter graduate on May 2. The whole ordeal, paradoxically, has made her more sanguine about flying in the future. As nerve-racking as the experience was, Ms. Mwangale said she learned an important lesson from the outpouring of kindness. “You might have a problem,” she said. “But as long as other people know it, it’s not only yours anymore.”