Dominican angels visited Haiti after the earthquake

When you search news about Haitian-Dominican relations, you often find mostly bad press: immigration problems, stories of racism and bad treatment of Haitians.  But, with the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, I saw something completely different.

After the earthquake, President Fernandez of the Dominican Republic was the first to pay a visit to the Haitian President, and Dominican rescuers were the first to be on the ground.  Also, in the ICT sector, INDOTEL, the Dominican telecom regulator, has been very active in helping maintaining communications in the country.  Of course, one would say, they are our neighbors; they are closest to us than any other country, and most of our international routes for the Internet go through the DR anyway.  But, they could have been indifferent.  How many times have you been in trouble and your closest neighbor is not necessarily the first one to offer help?  In fact, all of this was just the tip of the iceberg; that’s what was the most visible, and I would like to share my personal experience to show how deep and sincere the help of Dominicans were in the crisis.

My close family was luckily safe after the earthquake, but my wife’s family was not that lucky.  Among the survivors, a 5-year old boy, Sam, my wife’s nephew, was badly injured in the head.  His 11-year sister did not make it…  The hospitals that were not destroyed were overwhelmed with the number of casualties, and it was impossible to even get in touch with a neurologist, let alone to find a working “cat scan” to examine the kid.  While visiting and trying different hospitals and ad hoc clinics, I also asked for help through mailing lists, and through the CIVIC community, and the response from my Dominican friends was overwhelming.

Finally, I had the option to drive to the border and hand the kid to a group that would transport him to a hospital in Santo Domingo.  As I was about to hit the road at 7h00PM in the night, I got a call saying that a private plane was coming to get us at 9:00PM at the airport to take us to Santiago, in the DR (I learned afterwards that he might have not survived if we had taken the road with him).

The plane was one of Estrella, a Dominican construction company that is actually building roads in Haiti.  I felt privileged to have this opportunity, since this pickup was arranged by my father-in-law.  Ambulances were waiting for Sam at the Santiago airport; he was quickly transported to the hospital and his life was saved.  But, what I found out later is that this plane has been going back and forth between Port-au-Prince and Santiago, taking injured kids to hospitals.  Nobody had asked them to do it.  They were just helping.

My wife and I took the opportunity to visit the traumatized Haitian kids in the Homs hospital in Santiago, helping with translation, etc.  During our stay there, Dominican families came to visit, bringing clothes and toys for the kids.  Almost every Dominican we met while we were there showed real compassion and offered help in some way, from the taxi driver, the hair doer, to Estrella staff members who also came to visit.  While leaving the DR to the USA, we even almost missed our flight because the immigration officer kept talking with us to explain how affected he was by the tragedy and how the stories about hatred between Dominicans and Haitians are individual, isolated problems that some people are manipulating for other reasons.  That was his words.

Personally, I have always wished and I worked for more cooperation between Haitians and Dominicans.  In the ICT sector, I worked with many Dominicans and on several projects, and I always thought that the situation was not as bad as it was reported in the news.  I think that the earthquake showed how much compassion the Dominican people have, and that this compassion is mainstream.  I didn’t even talk about the fact that on all TV networks I witnessed fundraising activities for Haiti, and that Dominicans even donated blood to help Haitian victims.  We need to build on that, and not on the politically-motivated discourses.

Sam is still in Santiago with his mom and dad, and he is fine.  I wanted to write this because I think that Dominicans did not get enough recognition for their help compared with the coverage that other nations got during the earthquake.  Also, I wanted to publicly thank Estrella, a company that gave a new meaning to the social corporate responsibility concept.

How information technology and the Internet saved lives in the earthquake in Haiti

As all of you probably know, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti in the Caribbean on January 12 at about 4:53PM.  It is estimated that about 300.000 people died, making this catastrophe the deadliest one since the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and the deadliest earthquake since the 1976 one in China.

Countries are rarely well prepared for natural disasters.  Even in developed countries, we have seen how difficult it is to prepare and respond to catastrophes, so there is no need to explain the seriousness of the situation in an economically devastated country like Haiti that was just starting to recover from the four hurricanes it suffered two years ago.  There was no contingency planning, no emergency procedures or response systems, no proper redundancy of critical infrastructure, with some rare exceptions.  To make it short, people were on their own.

In some way, the earthquake preserved most of the core Internet infrastructure of the country and some parts of the cellular networks, so people were able to place some phone calls (very difficult; there is no 911-type service in Haiti), text (only on some networks) and access the Internet (with some limitations), although results varied greatly from one operator to the other.  The .ht root domain service was among the few that never stopped working, thanks to its distributed architecture in four different parts of the world and thanks to a diligent intervention from the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and from secondary DNS providers for .ht.

In the first few hours that followed the earthquake, mobile service was completely disrupted.  It was almost impossible to place a call, due to the combination of the damages on the cellular networks and the spike in phone calls.  However, on some networks, SMS service was still available.  People stuck under rubbles started texting to their friends and family (in Haiti and abroad) to tell them they were still alive and needed help.  Those friends and family, not knowing what to do, started posting these SOS messages on their social networks, mainly on Facebook.

The first thing I did the morning after the earthquake was to verify the status of the Internet infrastructure by texting instructions to Steven Huter, the Director of the Network Startup Resource Center at the University of Oregon, a long term collaborator on various IT projects in Haiti.  I had a server and a connection ready to process text messages from the cellular networks, but I could not contact the operators to ask them to broadcast a SMS message to all their clients to instruct them to text their location to a central number.

In Haiti, with a population of about 8 million people, there are about 4 million mobile phone subscribers. It is estimated that about 300,000 people have Internet access, but only a small percentage currently owns a smartphone with data plan.

I happen to have a smartphone with a data plan, and a Facebook widget on my home screen that gave me access to these SOS messages.  So, I started scouring Facebook to retrieve all those SOS messages, telling people on mailing lists and on Facebook to forward all SOS messages to me.  At some point, some people offered to help and they also started forwarding all SOS messages directly.  All the SOS messages were forwarded by email to Steven who had a direct email contact in the US State Department which was in turn in contact with rescue workers in the field.

So, many of these messages coming from texting under rubbles were ultimately delivered to rescue workers by a combination of personal initiatives, contacts and a chain of relayed messages using texting, the Internet, social networks and emails.

This is by no means a well thought out emergency response system, but this ad-hoc system actually saved a few lives.  Rescue workers were able to go directly to places where there was a chance of survival, after having visited the most obvious places.

This catastrophe sheds new light on the importance of communication.  Of course, this was already known, but it introduces at least three new perspectives:

1) The right to communicate doesn’t only relate to the freedom of expression, but also to the actual survival of a human being;

2) The ability to communicate across various channels actually increases your chance of survival

3) Mobile devices, specifically mobile phones, played a central role in the research for survivors

Point 1) is not really new.  Relevant operators usually are required to offer access to emergency services free of charge on their network, but in a world dominated by a multitude of different communication channels, it is paradoxical that those requirements pertain only to voice calls and, in some countries, only to land lines.

My experience in the earthquake in Haiti shows me that:

1) If you had a mobile phone during the earthquake, your chance of survival was higher if you got stuck alive under the rubbles;

2) This chance was increased if you could also text;

3) It was again multiplied if you could have access to the Internet from your mobile phone and/or were connected to a social network in some way

We should learn from that to build the next generation emergency contact systems.  These systems should be able to use different channels (voice, text, Internet) to offer more options to the person in danger.  We can even think about a one-touch mobile app that could automatically send to a central system an SOS message with GPS coordinates, voice and text messages, whatever is available at the time.  More than ever, the mobile phone and Internet access should no longer be a luxury.

The tale of an Android phone in the earthquake in Haiti

We talked extensively about why Android is better than some other smartphone OSes, its openness, its multitasking characteristics, but have you ever thought that its customization features could actually save lives? Well read on.

As all of you probably know, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti in the Caribbean on January 12 at about 4:53PM. It is estimated that about 300.000 people died, making this catastrophe the deadliest one since the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and the deadliest earthquake since the 1976 one in China.

In the first few hours that followed the earthquake, mobile service was completely disrupted. It was almost impossible to place a call, due to the combination of the damages on the cellular networks and the spike in phone calls. However, on some networks, SMS service was still available. People stuck under rubbles started texting to their friends and family (in Haiti and abroad) to tell them they were still alive and needed help. In Haiti, on a population of 8 million, there were about 4 million mobile phone subscribers. Those friends and family, not knowing what to do, started posting these SOS messages on their social networks, mainly on Facebook.

I happen to have an Android phone (the unlocked European version of the HTC Hero) on one of the cellular networks that was still working more or less, with a data plan. I was lucky enough not to be in the situation of those people (although I spent the night rescuing members of my wife’s family, at least those we could save… God save their souls).

The morning after the earthquake, I was able to text, and I started texting with Steven Huter, the Director of the Network Startup Resource Center at the University of Oregon with whom I have been working on Internet development projects, giving him instructions to log into servers at a critical Internet facility in Haiti to verify the status of Internet connectivity in the country. Fortunately, those facilities were still live and the day after, Internet access was restored on my phone.

Well, when you are in such a situation, you don’t really think about going to Facebook, but it happens that I have a Facebook widget on my Android home screen that regularly displays status updates from my friends. All of a sudden, an SOS message appeared on my home screen as a status update of a friend on my network. Not all smartphones allow you to customize your home screen, let alone letting you put widgets on it. So, I texted Steven about it.

As Steven had already been working with the U.S. State Department on Internet development activities in Haiti, he quickly called a senior staff member at the State Department and asked how to get help to the people requesting it from Haiti. State Department personnel requested a short description and a physical street address or GPS coordinates. Via email and text messaging, I was able to relay this information from Port-au-Prince to Steven in Oregon, who relayed it to the State Department in Washington DC, and it was quickly forwarded to the U.S. military at the Port-au-Prince airport and dispatched to the search-and-rescue (SAR) teams being assembled. So the data went from my Android phone to Oregon to Washington DC and then back to the U.S. military command center at the Port-au-Prince airport. I was at first a little skeptical about their reaction: there was so much destruction; they probably already had their hands full. Unexpectedly, they replied back saying: “We found them, and they are alive! Keep it coming."

So, I started scouring Facebook to retrieve all those SOS messages, telling people on mailing lists and on Facebook to forward all SOS messages to me. At some point, in order to preserve my phone battery, I instructed them to send all SOS messages directly to Steven. Some people offered to help searching for SOS messages on the web (thanks to all of them who are reading this article).

Hundreds of Haitians were saved from the rubbles by rescue workers. By communicating information via my Android phone about trapped people to search-and-rescue personnel, they had a clear target and were therefore more efficient in going directly where there was a chance of survival. They saved as many as they could, but of course, sometimes they arrived too late.

This could be an article about Facebook, social networks, or even the benefits of the Internet, and I intent to write others in that sense, but in an Android audience, I wanted to address this angle specifically. I never thought that a rather futile feature of the Android OS would have had so much value as to save lives.