it's a small world after all

Thanks to facebook, I can usually keep track of what’s going on at home in Minnesota and Wisconsin (if the internet is working, that is). I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but I really don’t know what people did before the miraculous internet was invented. I can’t imagine being in rural Uganda for nine months without being able to check in on my friends and family almost daily online. And cell phones! I can talk to my family on my cheap Nokia cell phone with clearer reception than we sometimes have in the US.

WellShare has been in Sembabule for a really long time (something like 17 years), but we’ve only been in our current office for a couple of years. Before we were at this office in the center of town, the office was located just outside of town, and it had no electricity and no internet. Rose (the operations officer who has worked here for 10 years or so) told me about how up until a few years ago, they had to drive to Masaka (about an hour away) to use the internet, and they had to communicate via – gasp! – snail mail. I realize that this is just the way things were until recently (and still are, in some places), but I can’t imagine running an office like this without electricity. It’s hard enough for us when power is out for a day or two (or more, sometimes) but to have to drive an hour away to use the internet and a post office is kind of mindboggling now. It actually makes me feel spoiled, because although there is a great deal of culture shock involved in living here, at least I still have a cell phone (loaned to me by WellShare) and my own modem (which I purchased) to use the internet. The internet is generally slow and unreliable, so I can’t do anything fancy like watch videos or upload pictures, but hey, I can email and usually stalk a few people on facebook. It also seems kind of paradoxical sometimes, because we don’t have a refrigerator, we have to boil our water to drink it, we have no plumbing system, and I take bucket baths, but yet I have internet access and virtually everybody has a mobile phone.

The reason I was thinking about this is because thanks to facebook, I’ve been hearing all about the massive amount of snow in Minneapolis. I have to say, hearing about everybody being snowed in and stuck at home (not to mention the Metrodome – or shall I say Mall of America Field – roof collapse… karma, Favre, karma) made me a tad bit homesick. Minneapolis weather can be brutal, especially around January and February when I’m trudging to class before the sun has even risen, feeling the snot freeze inside my nostrils, but a heavy snowfall in December is wonderful. I can’t believe that I’m going to experience a winter completely free of snow for the first time in my life. I guess I’ll just appreciate it that much more next winter… that is, until I’m late for class because I spent a half an hour scraping the ice off of my windshield with a credit card.