IT in Kenya circa 1983

May 30 - Things have changed a little bit since I was in school.

The political situation in Thailand is not completely unfamiliar to me. I have lived through a
revolution in Ethiopia and a civil war in Uganda. In both countries I gathered information about the situation from any friendly adults who chose to inform me, or from what I could overhear of their conversations. It seemed most of their information was from 'word-of-mouth' too.

Things have changed a bit since those days, and it annoys me that in this "information age" we expect to have all the information we want with a few clicks of the keyboard, or finger swipes on the iphone.

So for all you impatient internet users who complain about not enough information, here's a flash from the not-too-distant past.

My parents were missionaries in Ethiopia and Uganda, and when I was in Jr. High and High School in the 1980s, I was sent to boarding school at Rift Valley Academy in Kenya. RVA is a marvelous school and is perched on the escarpment of the great Rift Valley looking out over a vast plain and ancient volcano, Mt. Longonot. (Nestled on one of the world's natural satellite dishes, I wonder if they have decent high-speed internet now.)

Those were the days before email, and snail mail earned its name. Very often I would return home for my trimester vacation ahead of the letter I'd posted three months earlier at the start of the previous school term. Those tear-splattered letters which described my homesickness and the pathetic details of my early adolescence were received warmly by my parents, but they were tragically out-dated by the time they arrived. I'd somehow survived the teasing and loneliness, and now I was home and all was well with the world. "But why didn't you call us?" they enquired.

Phoning Mbale, Uganda from Kijabe, Kenya in the mid-80s required standing in the cold wind at the phone booth for an hour or more, several nights in a row, with unpredictable results.

My brother and I would give the crank on the phone several enthusiastic spins, lift the earpiece and lean in to the wall-mounted mouthpiece. When the operator responded, we asked to be connected with Mbale Three. (My parents had the third phone line in the town.) We could hear the operator pulling out and pushing in plugs in the telecommunications office down the hill in Kijabe town and shouting, "Kijabe One to Mbale Three. Kijabe One to Mbale Three! Hello? Hello?" Then she would say to us, "You wait now." And that was it. We waited. Sometimes she called back to tell us she couldn't get through to Mbale Three. Sometimes we called her back to cancel the call because we had to meet curfew. As we left for our separate dorms, we would agree to meet the following evening to try again.

Day after day we would try, and sometimes we were lucky. As we stood dancing from foot to foot to keep warm, or huddled in the deep window wells on Kiambogo porch, sometimes the phone would ring and we would nearly collide trying to reach it first. "Mom? Dad? Is that you?" And if it was, we would take turns shouting above the static about nothing in particular, just being comforted by the sound of our parent's voices. I tried not to cry because I could hear the tightness in Mom's voice and knew she was trying not to cry too.

The phones lines were often down; they were highly valued for making jewelry or binding crops, so the governments of both countries had quite a job replacing them. The missionaries communicated with one another daily by radio.

When Museveni's army put Obote's army on the run, I heard rumors of fighting near my hometown. At school we did not have access to TV or radios, and remember, these were the days before the internet. The information we received was from other missionary children who had successfully called home and heard the news that had come over the two-way radio. If anything extraordinary happened, a local missionary would drive up to school to relay the news.

For the most part, we kids were kept in the dark. I suppose that was for the best, after all, we had our studies and social lives to attend to, but there was always that nagging, lurking fear that lingered in the back of my mind. I was taught to pray and trust in God, so I did. I prayed and trusted that at the end of the term, my parents would arrive to take me home.

So, when I'm frustrated with the spinning wheel on my screen, or the choppy skype connection, I don't have to riffle far through my memories to dig up those cold, windy nights on Kiambogo porch, when all I could do was pray for a connection. I think I'll print out the picture at the top of this page and tape it up behind my computer to remind me.