Communication Woes

We had the electricity go off at Africa University last Thursday (3/1), which is nothing unusual.  However, workmen had recently connected a number of separate generators so they could work in a coordinated fashion for whatever parts of campus lacked electricity.  The newly modified generators came on, then failed.  I'm not sure how that took the university computer server down (maybe there was a big power surge), but the upshot was that the server went down and has been corrupted, so we had no internet access and no email for a week. 

In January, the campus telephone system was being upgraded when a big bolt of lightning hit campus and destroyed most of the phone system.  University officials are still working to get someone to come in, probably from another country, to see what is salvagable and to decide what to do next about the telephone system.  In the meantime, very few telephones are working.  (I haven't had a working phone in my office at any point since I got here--there's only one on my floor of the Health Sciences Building that works.  This isn't important for me, but is for people who are running labs in another building or working to create attachments for students and supervise students in attachments scattered through this province.) 

For a week, official university communication has been by word of mouth or hand-delivered notes.  I found out about a required all-faculty meeting Tuesday of this week only five minutes before it was to start!

About 8:15 yesterday morning (3/8), I went over to the Information and Computer Technology (ICT) office and re-registered my user name and password, so now I have internet access again at the university.  However, everyone who had saved documents to their university computers can't access them, and it was not immediately clear whether they'll ever be recoverable.  I don't think the university has a regular system for backing up files, so there was fear that they might be gone permanently.  By today ICT has figured out how to get the documents back, but is having to go office to office to do that.  We don't have email yet, and there's not much hope for recovering anything that was saved in the email system.  Also, everyone's address books were lost.  So we all start from scratch, whenever they get the email part of the system running again.

Somone asked me about personal communication.  I have a cheap cell phone, for which I have bought a few minutes of call time.  Like most people here, I communicate mainly by instant message, since that doesn't cost money and calls cost by the minute.  The system has frequent breakdowns--I'd say that about one in four messages that I try to send won't go through on the first try, though they usually go within the first half hour.  I also have another phone, for which I buy gigabytes of time on the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis, since there's no computer connection at my apartment.  This connects me to a broadband network.  It works about 3/4 of the time when I try to get on it.  It's OK for looking up information pretty consistently.  It's fast enough to connect with the Cox Network for email about 1/2 the time.  Skype works about 1/3 of the time, without video and with some interruptions and needs to reboot, again because of the connection being too slow to sustain a call. 

Everyone adjusts to the vagaries of communication technology here pretty well.  After all, what's the alternative?  A few people have their own wi fi connections, but it's difficult to get those.  People have to provide proof of residency and utility bills for the past six months, get a letter from their employer, etc.  I could never fulfill their requirements in the time I'm here.  I'll appreciate my Android and my reliable internet connection when I get back home!