Haiti ? They wait outside crumbled schools or shattered markets, searching for sisters, fathers, children, lovers. They stand vigil at smashed buildings where sons were last known to be, or at tangles of concrete where their mothers once went shopping.

Across the ruins of Port-au-Prince — and from computer screens around the world — people are desperate to learn whether loved ones are among the living — or buried anonymously.

Haitians abroad are using Web sites and social networking systems to look for family members, but on the devastated island nation itself, people are resorting to more primitive methods. Town criers drive through neighborhoods announcing the names of missing people and locations of relatives who are trying to find them.

The impoverished country’s already poor communications system also collapsed, both because cellular telephone towers were toppled and because of an overload of calls from people trying to find family and friends.

Only one cellular network is working at the moment, and then only sporadically. Landline telephones are dead. Haitians once again are reduced to relying on “radio jol,” or bush radio, as they call the network that speedily spreads news by word of mouth.

The Red Cross launched a Web site Thursday for relatives and friends to post names of the missing.

Officials also set up old-fashioned desks in Port-au-Prince where people could physically register missing people starting today.