20 March 2010

phones

I never had a cell phone until I moved to Rwanda. About a week after I got there, J. and E. took me to the MTN Rwandacell office (there were not yet all the stores that later sprang up, although there might have been one or two) and bought me a sturdy little M0toro1a. I liked it. I put the language on Spanish, which was helpful because it meant that no one but me could figure out how to unlock it. Not that it mattered if anyone else could unlock it. I had no friends, at that point, to do anything crazy with my phone. I had been in the country for a week and the only people I had met were J. and E. (who were leaving in three weeks) and two coworkers who, while they were nice, had families and kids and stuff. It's not like we were hanging on the weekends.

I've had a cell phone ever since. A SIM card is the first thing I pick up in most countries - Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia - anywhere I am going to be for more than a week or two. I usually walk directly to a kiosk in the Arrivals Hall of the airport and throw down the cash. I have become accustomed to the idea of being able to call someone to check in - "Ok, I'm at the restaurant. Are you already inside, or should I get a table?"

The only place, since 2002, where I have been without a cell phone for a significant period of time was Southern Sudan, and that felt strange and vulnerable. When I first arrived at the big airstrip an hour and a half from Tiny Little Town, no one came to pick me up. I stood there in the 100+ degree heat for a few minutes, looking around at the options. There were soldiers (and only soldiers) lounging about in the single hanger. There were a couple of white mercenaries in khakis and white t-shirts who rolled up in an unmarked Land Cruiser, jumped into helicopters, and took off. There were fellow passengers loading into NGO-marked Land Cruisers. And there was me, alone, with no phone. Fortunately, the other NGO-type people had satellite phones and were willing to share them (despite the $1/minute cost). Still more fortunately, the pimped-out minibus with the paper pineapples dangling from the rear-view mirror, the one that my organization had hired after our Land Cruiser broke down, arrived just before I hitched a ride to Bigger Town Three Hours Away. If I had a cell phone, though, I think I would have been much more comfortable waiting there with the soldiers and mercenaries.

I spent my whole three months in Southern Sudan watching the progress on the cell phone tower that was, in theory, being built. I didn't see it completed, but I got a text from a friend there a few months later: cell phone coverage finally reached TLT at the beginning of 2008. It is virtually everywhere in the world now.

This is how ubiquitous cell phones have become: when I turned on my US phone in Vietnam, it had network.

I can't imagine, anymore, a world without cell phones. I feel lost when I forget mine, or when I travel without one.

I will be arriving in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Wednesday morning, and my sister is supposed to pick me up from the airport. I am so dependent on cell phones now that it makes me a little nervous to know that I won't be able to turn on my phone and call her from the airport. And yet, when I lived in Honduras before, none of us had cell phones. We simply had to meet where we said we would meet. Imagine that.

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