Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Shi­an Ba­boolal, 15, is no stranger to the flood­ing that of­ten af­fects Pe­nal/Debe. She and her fam­i­ly have of­ten been ma­rooned when flood wa­ters sur­round their home at Mulchan Trace, Pe­nal, and she can re­call nu­mer­ous times when they had to leave their ve­hi­cle be­hind and wade through murky wa­ter to get home.

“One time we were ac­tu­al­ly strand­ed out the road and we had to wait un­til night time to come in and one time we were strand­ed in Good­man Trace and had to come home on a truck,” she said

On an­oth­er oc­ca­sion, one of the fam­i­ly’s ve­hi­cles was de­stroyed by flood wa­ters in San Fer­nan­do.

Now Shi­an is part of a team of 19 Form Five Ge­og­ra­phy stu­dents at Par­vati Girls’ Hin­du Col­lege de­vel­op­ing a tool to help first re­spon­ders dur­ing nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

Since April 29, they have been train­ing un­der the Women-Cen­tred Dis­as­ter Re­silience in Small Is­land De­vel­op­ing States (WC­DR in SIDS) pro­gramme.

Through this project, fa­cil­i­tat­ed by the Graph­ic In­for­ma­tion Sys­tems So­ci­ety of T&T (GIS­STT) and fund­ed through the Unit­ed States-based Hu­man­i­tar­i­an Open Street Map Team, the teens were taught how to use sys­tems and in­put da­ta and have now em­barked on the pi­lot project, Girls Map­ping for Dis­as­ter Re­silience.

Us­ing satel­lite im­agery, the girls mapped out the im­me­di­ate area around their flood-prone Debe school.

The da­ta mapped in­to the repos­i­to­ry in­cludes res­i­den­tial homes, busi­ness­es and places of spe­cial in­ter­est.

GIS­STT’s projects and spe­cial ini­tia­tives of­fi­cer Priya Harnar­ine said once com­plet­ed the map could be used by first re­spon­ders to plan and de­liv­er as­sis­tance to af­fect­ed com­mu­ni­ties dur­ing dis­as­ters.

“This is ac­tu­al­ly our pi­lot project. We in­tend to ex­pand, af­ter this project, to oth­er sec­ondary schools and oth­er women-led or­gan­i­sa­tions through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go and even­tu­al­ly the re­gion,” she said.

Shi­an is ex­cit­ed about be­ing part of some­thing that could ben­e­fit her com­mu­ni­ty.

“It’s re­al­ly in­ter­est­ing to know that in­ter­na­tion­al peo­ple could see what we map­ping and stuff. It’s ba­si­cal­ly a re­al nice feel­ing to know that we do that and we in­for­ma­tion go­ing to help in fu­ture sit­u­a­tions,” she said.

Prin­ci­pal of Par­vati Girls’, Dr Shar­da Ma­haraj-Ram­jat­tan, thanked the school’s Ge­og­ra­phy teacher, Gail Bhim­s­ingh, for in­tro­duc­ing the pro­gramme to the school.

“I am hop­ing these stu­dents now take all that they have learnt (and) not on­ly go in­to their com­mu­ni­ties but come in­to the school and work with their fel­low sis­ters and so con­tin­ue to ed­u­cate them, pass on the knowl­edge and train­ing and take it up be­cause we are head­ing in­to flood sea­son now,” she said.