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Forty delegates from throughout the Caribbean and Latin America are here for the meeting which is all about contingency plans, what to do when something, or many things go wrong - as always happens in a disaster. The facilitator explained it's about finding the holes in the system and plugging them:

Jan Gelfand, Deputy Director - PGMS and Operations - Red Cross America's
"What this meaning doing here is that we are trying to put all those pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together so that everybody knows what they should be doing. We know how we can bring everyone together to really be able to respond in a quick and efficient manner. This is bringing people together in a continuation of a process. These plans are already there, but in the course of the year national societies from throughout the region gain new skills, they have new ways of working, they have new ways of innovation and technology come up, so we try to make sure that we are up to date with how we address. A short example: we now have the ability to do our assessments of needs telephones; on an android base system so that we can put them into a cloud and people have immediately real-time access to what's happening so they know what's happening. Navy has access to that, donors have access to that, so what this means is a continuation of doing better what we've already been doing because we've been working together for years and years."

The regional meeting is an annual event and is being hosted for the first time by the Belize Red Cross. It ends on Thursday.