The Technological Hunger

CELL-Le-Luia CELL-Le Luia Celleluia

I can not even begin to describe to you how excited our group was on cell phone day. For the week leading up to the 6th of March, we had all been counting down the days until we would travel to the capital, Windhoek, and once again become a part of society. We would be able to receive and make calls, text each other (and some lucky US loved ones with AT&T and T-Mobile), and use the internet. Yes, you heard that last part correctly...we would be able to access the internet from our phones. And all of this for fairly reasonable prices too.

The cell phone system is quite different in Namibia than it is in the States. First, it is mostly a prepay system. You initially start with about 20 Namibian dollars which is about 2 American dollars, and then you can always add additional money later at any time. Now N$20 doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you work the system right, it can go very far. Thankfully, the volunteers that have come before shared all of their tips and tricks with us, so we didn’t have to figure it out on our own. Basically, we get about a hundred texts a day for N$0.40, all incoming texts and calls are free, and internet is dirt cheap (like N$0.50 a day on average). We just sync our phones and computers through Bluetooth, and then we have full access to the World Wide Web.

You don’t know what having internet access meant to our group. It meant no more racing each other to the internet café in Okahandja during our brief lunch time, and fighting over who gets online. It meant the freedom to check email whenever we wanted. It meant “Hello world, we’re back in the 21st century with the rest of you”.

We had been without internet for what seemed like such a long period that we were starving for it. When we arrived in Windhoek, we entered the town like a pack of hungry lions. At first we were cautious, observing our surroundings. Then we proceeded to the various cell phone shops. They were our watering holes, where the cellular game gathered. We were patient, and like all good predators we observed the various cell phone models. We took mental note of which ones were low priced, thus making them easier to catch, and we also took especially fond notice to the meat of the phones, because like I said, we were especially hungry for the fat, the internet feature.

After spending several hours roaming the land of Windhoek for the most fertile watering hole, and carefully planning our attack…it was feeding time. It was a frenzy as we raced to the store Game, desperately hoping that the other blood-thirsty volunteers would not finish off the coveted prey, the Nokia 2630, before we arrived. As we rushed the store, a crowd of spectators watched as we first surrounded the phones, picked them off one by one from the herd, tore at the packages, their skin, with tooth and claw, and then finally in satisfying a deep and primal nature, devoured them completely until we had our fill, or until their blood, our talk-time was depleted.

The beast, the American in us, got exactly what it wanted that day. We are once again connected to the rest world. The game are plentiful, the famine is over, and our hunger is quelled…well…at least for now…