Lebanese are getting used to reassuring loved ones at home and abroad that they have survived after having to deal with three bomb attacks in January alone. And now, there's an app for that, Agence France-Presse reported.
"I am Alive," is the somewhat macabre brainchild of 26-year-old Sandra Hassan, a Lebanese masters student living in Paris.
After an attack, the app allows users to quickly tweet a standard message, "I am still alive!" with the hashtags #Lebanon and #LatestBombing.
In the wake of a suicide car bomb in the southern Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik that killed four people, Hassan uploaded the smartphone app on Tuesday. According to AFP, after a car bomb in the northern town of Hermel and an earlier bombing that also targeted Haret Hreik, the blast was the third to hit Lebanon this month.
"Every time there's an explosion or similar event in Lebanon we all rush to our phones, wracking our brains for friends or family that we know live or work in the area that we need to get in touch with," Hassan told AFP.
As Hassn lives far from her friends and family in Lebanon, the problem is even more prominent for her.
"After the explosion on Tuesday, I developed and published this app as a joke, a sort of dark humor, that in the situation we are currently living in such an application could be practical," she said.
The app for Android phones has only been online for 48 hours, so as of yet there are no statistics on how many people have downloaded it, AFP reported. But for something she had planned as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the situation in Lebanon, Hassan admit she was taken aback by the level of interest in it.
On the app page, users have been promised that a new app is being planned which will allow Lebanese politicians to tweet pro-forma condemnations of each new attack, Hassan said.
"I did not expect the feedback that the application got at all, nor did I expect to receive requests for bettering the app and making it a real tool to be used to reach out to loved ones," she said.
With a brutal 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 and a string of political assassinations from 2005, Lebanon is no stranger to violence, AFP reported. However, the country has seen a sharp uptick in violence linked to the conflict in neighboring Syria after a period of relative calm. That means there's a market for the app Hassan has created, something she can't quite celebrate, according to AFP.
"The fact that it could actually serve a practical purpose is a bitter pill to swallow."
