Technology is a beautiful thing...when it works the way we want it to. Living in Ghana, a place considered third world, you learn to love technology for everything it can give you, and hate it when it doesn't work the way its supposed to. Right now as I write this, the kids are outside watching a movie being projected on the side of the house with a new projector. They had missed out on friday "movie nights" for the past several weeks because the projector that we had been using decided it had lived long enough and died. The kids hated technology then. Tonight they are loving it. And they don't even think about it. In America, we are so used to depending on our "devices", and we are so fortunate that when something doesn't work, we have a backup, or often have multiple ways to handle a problem, especially when it comes to communication. Things are different here in Africa, so I thought I'd try to explain how things work here, especially internet and communication.
We knew when we left the States that one of the first things we would need when we got here was a phone. Our old cell phones wont work for international calling. We knew if we got smart phones, we could use them for internet access also, so we bought a couple of Androids. You then have to buy a small card called a SIM card from one of the several wireless companies here to make the phone connect to a service. We did all that, got the phones home and tried to use them to connect to the internet, and they wouldn't work. It turns out that the place that sold the phones needed to activate some kind of code in them in order for them to connect to broadband. They didn't tell us that. So we waited for almost a week and a half till we could get back to the store and have them activated.
Now for the interesting part about how the internet works here. To get air time for either calls or internet, you have to buy credit. Credits can be purchased almost anywhere. Mostly from hawkers along the road. I have no idea how they get it and how the money thing works. All I know is that you pay for a card that has a scratch off section under which there is a code that you enter into your phone, and it earns you so much air time or data credit, whichever you choose. If you get a 10 GHC(Ghana cedis)card, which is about 5 US dollars, you can split it and get around an hour or so of international calls, and 200 mb of data usage. Not bad for the call time, but if you know data, 200 mb isn't that much, and you can go through that pretty quick. Uploading pictures uses more data, and so does spending mush time surfing pages that continually have to reload. We have to be careful not to spend too much time on facebook or just surfing if we want the credit to last. We try to check our facebook and update everyday, and have found that 200 mb will last about a week and a half to two weeks if we don't use it excessively.
We also have the same basic system with a wi-fi modem that receives a broadband signal and allows us to connect our laptops or iPads to the internet. It works ok, but we have found that it takes about 80 GHc worth of credit($40) to last a month, with 3 or 4 people using it for emails and blog posts, or finding info for study,etc.
So the first problem...it's expensive. Between Dawns phone, my phone and the modem, a months worth of access is around fifty dollars. That may not sound all that expensive if it were good high speed, but that brings up the second issue... this is Ghana, and the signal is broadband, so its not always very fast. I don't understand the whole 3G and 4G broadband thing, but most of the time here, the little receiver sign on the phone or modem says "edge" which apparently isn't real good. Remember back to the old dial up days- thats close! We have learned to write emails and blogs offline, then copy and paste so we don't lose them or to make it quicker to be on and offline.
We also learned that, because of the way this all works, it is almost impossible to use things like Skype or FaceTime to communicate with family, because its just not fast enough, and uses too much data.
Other challenges with technology here: frequent power outages. Sometimes everyday. Little fingers that like to push buttons and click things when they shouldn't. Power here is 240v instead of 110v, so everything has to have plug adapters, and some things just wont work. Things are just different. And as I finish writing this, Dawn is trying to send and email, but cant because one of our laptops will not connect to the wifi. We have tried everything and it just wont connect, and now the other laptop will not allow her to transfer the document from a thumb drive because the word program was apparently a trial version and expired, so it cant read the document. What good is a laptop that doesn't even have a basic word program!? The iPad we have connects just fine, but doesn't have a USB port to put the thumb drive.... grrr.....SO...
For us here, technology can be so frustrating, but at the same time, it is a blessing to have whatever connection to home we can have.
In whatever form it comes, technology is one of God's "common graces" that we thank him for, even if it doesn't always work the way we want!
Cayle
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