We Are The Volunteers of Mission 4636

Francesca Garrett is a Psychology student in New Haven, CT. When she isn’t translating SMS messages (or in the chat room as AnyaPetrova), she writes for Mission 4636, and serves as Resource Coordinator for the Translation Team and Fletcher School Situation Room. She can be reached at francesca.garrett@gmail.com

Valérie-Ann Nathalie Michel was a vibrant 34 year old working in Port au Prince as a Bank Manager. She was known locally for her love of photography, and most days could be found at the National Palace,
camera in hand. She held daily prayer groups in her home and sang with
her family, joking that the Michels would be the next big music crew.
Then the January 12 earthquake struck, and Danielle was buried beneath
the rubble.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, a talented team of programmers, designers, and volunteers launched a free phone number,
4636, allowing Haitian survivors to send requests for aid along with a
location, name, and phone number. Ushahidi Inc., an open source project
which allows users to crowdsource crisis information, launched http://haiti.ushahidi.com,
and began tracking the requests in partnership with the U.S. Department
of State, InSTEDD, Thomson-Reuters, Digicel, Voila /Comcel, and
countless others. There was just one problem: the messages were in
Creole.

Now it’s January 20th, and Nathalie’s brother, Fred Michel, sits at his computer entering GPS coordinates. His shoulders shake a little as he remembers the depth of his loss. On his screen, a chorus on digital
voices rush to comfort him. “Respe Nathalie,” “We remember Nathalie.”
Fred is logged into the Mission 4636 Translation site, and tonight most
of us are working in his sister’s memory.

Mission 4636 is the first stop for the emergency SMS messages from the ground in Haiti. Before they can be sent to Ushahidi teams around the world for
triage and dispersal, our translators must first decode the
heartbreaking requests, always in the same polite tone despite their
desperation.

I first stumbled in the Mission 4636 Chat Room (where translators ask for assistance with slang or landmark identification) a week ago. I’ve hardly logged off since. Like many in the group, my computer
follows me into the kitchen while I cook, and stays inches from my head
as I nap. We often joke about the addiction, and members typically say
goodnight half a dozen times, unwilling to leave the message queue
unmanned.

In the early days, we would call the families of missing survivors who had sent us messages, “Mwen vivan!” “I’m alive! Please tell my family.” These days the conversions still move easily from grief to
elation (“Mwen pa rive sove lavil”….”I couldn’t save her”…”I just saw
my first ultrasound – it’s a girl!”), but are more often focused on
improving our geo-mapping skills and on the future.

A constant stream of support runs between friends who have never met. Sarah Bernard (UHSarahB) has translated our instructions page into three different languages, widening our volunteer base. Sebastian (Sea
Bass) somehow finds hours each day (despite two young children and a
very pregnant wife) to find much needed improvements in our technology.
Another user, Sxpert has created a code that automatically pulls the
trickier coordinates from our conversations, and logs the locations in
a spreadsheet I created. The goal? Accuracy.

And it’s working. Two days ago a young woman in Haiti went into labor. She was bleeding out and her life was in danger. She texted 4636. Across the world, one of our translators pinpointed her location
on a map. The US Coast Guard would later tell us that the latitude and
longitude provided were accurate to 5 decimal points.

We’re making a difference in Haiti. But sometimes, when morale lags at 3:00am, we need to be reminded that we are making a difference in the lives of the people we work with as well.

We are the volunteer translators of Mission 4636. We span six time zones and seven languages on any given night. We are students, medics, stay at home mothers, archivists, firefighters, and
software developers. We are the quiet force behind Ushahidi Haiti &
we give a voice to the lost.