By Yard Report, Kingston.
image: “https://picsum.photos/seed/whatsapp-phone/1280/720"
The Meteorological Service of Jamaica issues its bulletins at scheduled intervals, in professional language, through official channels. The bulletins are technically accurate. They are also, for most of the country, the third or fourth source anyone checks.
The first source is Aunty Merle’s WhatsApp group.
Aunty Merle is a retired schoolteacher from Above Rocks who has seventeen grandchildren, four WhatsApp groups, and a talent for forwarding weather warnings approximately forty-five minutes before the Met Service officially issues them. No one knows how she does this. She does not appear to have insider access to radar data. She is simply faster than the government, and she has been faster than the government for approximately eleven years.
At 3:00 A.M. on the morning of any serious weather event, the following cascade occurs in approximately this order:
- Aunty Merle posts “DI RAIN SETTING UP BAD” with no further elaboration and seven weather emojis.
- Her daughter in Queens, who has been woken up by the notification, responds with “Mommy yuh ok??”
- Her son in Kingston, who has not yet been woken up, is then woken up by his wife, who has been woken up by her sister in the group chat.
- A cousin in St. Mary forwards a video — taken by someone else’s cousin — of a river that is technically a road. This video will circulate for six hours and be reposted by at least three news outlets without attribution.
- By 6:00 A.M., before any official advisory has been issued, every Jamaican with a phone has already decided whether to go to work.
This is not a failure of the official system. The Met Service does its job. It issues bulletins. The bulletins arrive. They arrive at roughly the time that everyone has already made their plans based on Aunty Merle, and the official bulletin therefore functions less as a warning and more as a formal confirmation of a decision already made.
Disaster preparedness experts sometimes describe the Jamaican response as “informal.” This is charitable. The actual system is: seventeen grandchildren, a group chat titled “FAMILY ❤️🇯🇲” (no capitalisation conventions survive in this group), and one woman in Above Rocks who knows when the rain is coming before the rain does.
Attempts to digitise or institutionalise this system have all failed. You cannot build an app that replicates Aunty Merle, because Aunty Merle is not a system. She is a person. She will be replaced, eventually, by one of her grandchildren — probably the one who moved back from Fort Lauderdale — and that grandchild will be slightly worse at it for the first two years, and then slightly better.
In the meantime, the National Works Agency can announce whatever drainage improvements it wishes. The family group chat will decide, independently, whether to believe them.
The thing about living inside this system is that it is humiliating to explain to outsiders and entirely functional for the people inside it. Overseas relatives who move back to Jamaica often complain, for the first six months, that “nothing works here.” After eighteen months they stop complaining, because they have been added to three WhatsApp groups and they now know, before everyone else on their block, exactly when the rain is coming.
They do not always know how they know. Aunty Merle, characteristically, has not explained.
image: “https://picsum.photos/seed/whatsapp-phone/1280/720"
Yard Report is a Tradewinds Brief column from Kingston. Sardonic, affectionate, and appearing whenever the author feels moved.