Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Africaitice

I had a little bit of what I'm calling Africaitice yesterday. Every morning at 6:15am I try to call Nathan using Skype, which requires me to be online. Yesterday, there was a downpour around that time, so I got out my poncho, shoved the computer under it and ran to the hotel's computer lab. It was closed. Not only that, but our team had installed a wireless access point for the hotel, but they turn off the power in the computer lab every night, so the wireless wasn't even working.

Darn, I thought, but the hotel down the street has an unsecured wireless network, so I decided to walk down there to try to connect. However, not only was the gate to our complex closed and locked, but theirs was too. I got our guard to open our gate and, standing on the driveway, was able to connect to their wireless connection - 48%. I found it really interesting that, here I was, in the middle of Africa, standing in the rain on a driveway, connected to the world - albeit a very slow connection. I never did get a chance to talk to Nathan yesterday after all that shenanigans, but I guess it is pretty amazing that I was able to connect at all. Looking on the bright side, I think it symbolizes that Africa is coming along. From what I've seen, I don't think they will be able to catch up to the rest of the world very quickly, but they are catching up.

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