Myette.org

For those of you not in the Caribbean basin and glued to the National Hurricane Center website, Gustav has been plowing through the Caribbean wavering back and forth between a hurricane and a tropical storm.  At the moment it’s moving away from Jamaica after slowing making it’s way across the island over the last 18 hours.  My sister Michele happens to be in Jamaica visiting her friend Beth who works at the U.S. Embassy in Kingston. 

Rather than me rehashing what she has alread written you can read all about her experiences and what’s happening over at her blog michele.myette.org.  My topic here is more about the process of her communicating from in the middle of a hurricane.  So far they have been able to communicate by cell phone but with $4 a minute charges to call from Jamaica and $1.50 a minute prices for my parents to call Jamaica from the U.S. our communication has been somewhat limited.  But text messaging is cheaper ($.35 for an international text) so Michele has been able to send text messages. 

In my world of development and relief there’s been a fair amount of buzz about using new technologies for early warning and disaster response in both humanitarian emergencies and natural disasters (see this Economist article for an example).  So I put some of these tools to use to try and help my parents and other family members keep updated about how Michele was doing.     

I figured out a way for Michele to post to her blog by sending a text message.  I used Twitter as the go between to link her text messages to her Wordpress blog.  The details aren’t important, what’s most interesting is that in about 25 minutes using free services (except for the actual text messages themselves) Michele and I have been able to figure out a way for her to communicate from the middle of a hurricane.  While her text posts are limited to 140 characters, it’s still pretty cool stuff with some amazing and innovative potential for emergency responders everywhere.  The Google foundation is working on this for pandemic disease early warning and Patrick Meier (a Fletcher PhD candidate) writes about applying technology to humanitarian response at his blog.

In the mean time know that Michele is safe and texting away from Jamaica.  Check out michele.myette.org if you have a chance to read her updates.