Fancy Phones

Bring to mind your stock image of a Peace Corps Volunteer. Reading this blog, maybe it's a kid from Wisconsin, somewhere in Africa. Its a hot afternoon and he is relaxing in the shade of the grass roof of his stone house. About the small room can be found the expected scant furnishings; a table and chairs, a small stove and a bed. A beat-up old guitar in one corner and a backpack lying on the floor. But lo! Where there should be stacks of beat-up novels and worn out old books, we find, of all things, a kindle! And our subject is found reposing in his bed, furiously typing away on a Blackberry! Come night time, he will munch away on his simple dinner of samp and beans while watching the latest episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” on his laptop.

This social, cultural, and technological concoction is the common stew of Africa today, and the PCV is but an extreme example of this norm. We get our water from taps (or even hand pumps) and bathe from a bucket while listening to an iPod. Transplanted Americans are not the exception here, and even the dirtiest, blanket clad herd boy is usually equipped with a cell phone with which he can text his buddies or wirelessly transfer money to his family. It's not an uncommon sight to find a bush-taxi driver at the local internet cafe, cruising websites in search of good deals for his next vehicle.

From my house, the immediate view is of stone rondavols with thatch roofs and a few cinder-block dwelling sporting corrugated metal roofing. As you raise your eyes, the fields, freshly plowed by oxen or donkey teams, give way to mountains and a jagged brown horizon. The distant gleam of aluminum pit-latrines betray far-away villages which would otherwise blend into the rocky mountains from which they are constructed. Finally, to both the east and west, one can see the omnipresent cell phone towers. Though no one in sight has indoor plumbing, only a small number of families will be found lacking a cell phone or two.

This is Africa. A land, to the outsider, chock-full of seeming paradoxes and frustrations. Though still quite the outsider myself, I have learned that things really do have an order and reason to them. The problem is the very culture and context in which everything exists is just so very different from anything I am used to. This important underlying structure is not always, at least to me, transparent, accessible, or easy to grasp.

Some thing are now clear to me: with Africa's generally rural and decentralized layouts, things like land-line phone systems never made any sense and were thus generally passed over in the progress of communication technologies here. However, other things, like the accepted use of perpetually crowded, unreliable, and unscheduled minibus taxis as a primary mode of transportation, will probably win over my Americanized logic.