Wireless at the Provincial House

My wireless won’t hook up.

This is a familiar problem in an unfamiliar time and place. It’s something I came to expect in college, huddled in one of the campus’ brightly-colored common rooms, fighting over 2,000 other students for valuable airspace before the onset of exams (half of us trying to do actual last-minute work, the rest simply refreshing facebook for the gazillionth time in a rush of desperate escapism), and it’s a familiar sort of general technologically-induced frustration I learned to cope with at an early age, huddled around a massive beige desktop in a closet-turned-computer-room and begging the antiquated AOL phone line to open up and let me in. Despite the impressive and constant leaps and bounds of technological progress, we all still seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get the stuff to actually work in the first place.

But this is a frustration I have been mostly liberated from these last 8 months. These days my biggest technological concerns involve finding enough dry wood (and it is raining nearly every day now) to light my woodstove and keeping my glass-coke-bottle-candle-holders from being knocked over by the cat. When I visited the Peace Corps Provincial House in Serenje in June, my first time there since being dropped off in front of a mudhut at the end of April, my fellow volunteers and I made a big joke of fawning over the oven and jumping in surprise at the brightening of a light bulb. Carrying nothing but a camera, ipod, flashlight, cell phone, and portable solar panel with me into the bush, I have been living relatively tech-free…by American standards, at least.

Don’t think this means I’ve been free from technical frustrations-- the cell phone, bought my first day in Lusaka, did not successfully connect to the internet like it was supposed to until nearly two months and thousands of failed attempts later (and unproductive phone calls to the Zambian network administrators), and while my ipod has been my saving grace, all the earphones I brought have broken, and I am currently reduced to holding a too-small plug at the right angle in the too-large socket so I can hear out of the left side of my last set of partially-working earphones that aren’t intended for an ipod at all-- but mostly my goal of freeing myself from my technological addiction has been successful.

Now, however, circumstances have changed. When my father and stepmother departed from Serenje in September, they left me a portable DVD player and very small, almost-no-memory e-series computer. And to make matters more bizarrely American, the provincial house finally (after a typical 6 month delay-- typical of Zambia, technological development in general, and technological development in Zambia) got a wireless internet satellite dish installed this week.
It couldn’t have arrived a moment too soon; this week is provincials, a Peace Corps general meeting that takes place twice per year. This is one of Central Province’s few opportunities to all be together at the same time, and it is also an opportunity to meet a fresh intake of new volunteers (“new” being relative-- they arrived in July and were posted in their villages in September). So, of course, being the 21st century Americans we are, we celebrated our newfound social opportunities by immediately staking out outlets and plugging in our computers. Oh the joys of wireless internet-- for a minute, sitting in a grungy room surrounded by unwashed 20-somethings and the sound of clacking keys, I felt like I was back in college. Then the power flickered off for 15 minutes and I remembered exactly where I was.

But while other people seem to have managed, despite the intermittent flickering of network power, to make some semblance of an internet connection, I am having some difficulty. One minute the little doo-hickey will say it’s working, and then the thingamajig won’t load and the whatsit says it can’t find the server. I suppose it’s partially due to the number of people trying to connect at once-- the line must be very busy right now-- and partially due to me not knowing this computer very well yet-- I did just get it two months ago, and haven’t had very many chances to use it since I don’t have electricity.

So I’m basically sitting at the dining room table fiddling around with my new computer-- turns out I have skype, which could be great if I can get enough internet connection to set it up and a strong enough connection to actually use it. Also, this computer has spider solitaire, which may be the only advantage of getting a PC instead of a Mac. I have a few more pictures from my safari trip, which I’ll post here eventually, though that means posting will take an eon. They’re very pretty-- South Luangwa is a beautiful place, beautiful animals, beautiful trees, beautiful skies. The sky everywhere in Zambia is amazing, actually, and if the moon is more than ¼ full it illuminates the entire landscape with silver light.


The week so far has been interesting-- in addition to the traditional meetings, we’ve also had a small appropriate technology workshop, where we’ve been finding creative (and cheap) ways to encourage health, fuel efficiency, and food security. We built a stove, the smoke from which feeds a meat smoker, and learned to make charcoal from corn cobs, which is a good idea because Zambians use a lot of corn to make nshima, their favorite staple food. But I think the real excitement will be Thanksgiving dinner-- we have two live turkeys, going to slaughter and cook them ourselves, good times. Peace Corps is hard core. We unfortunately could not find a pumpkin-- they’re out of season-- but I will be spending a good deal of quality time cutting apples for pies tonight!

Not much more to report-- I’m going to attempt a Zambian x-mas card this year, so if you think you’re entitled to one make sure I have your address right. One more good thing about Zambia: not too many x-mas carols on the radio starting this Friday. Not that I’ll notice, since my radio doesn’t get reception at my site…

UPDATE: Figured it out, I had accidentally mistyped the password when signing in, which begs the question of why the network claimed I had signed in correctly…anyway, good news, now I can post this!