New Computer!

Yesterday my replacement computer arrived in Kankan and I am super delighted. It's so giant (compare to my netbook) and the screen is so clean and shiny and crisp. I keep feeling like my eyes are over-focusing. 

Getting a new computer in Guinea can be a bit of a challenge - the postal system isn't reliable enough to ship anything of value, and you can't buy them in Kankan. I hear that you can buy computers in Conakry, but they're exorbitantly priced, on account (I assume) of the limited demand and expense of bringing them in to the country.

As it happened, my neighbor's friend was planning on coming to visit Guinea, and she very kindly offered to bring stuff with her. So, my mom sent her the computer (and I had a few things from Amazon sent to her house) and she packed it all up and brought it with her.

This morning I gazed at my impossibly clean computer while I enjoyed a lovely breakfast of leftover cinnamon rolls (we cooked a lot this weekend) and Malarone, and vowed to be more careful with this one. I've downloaded Skype and am starting to get the hang of Windows 8 (which has many new features, some of them completely infuriating) and am happy to one again have a portable laptop.

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While I was living in a rural village I didn't really miss the internet. After the initial withdrawal, the urge to check e-mail subsided and I was pretty content to check my messages every couple weeks when I went in to town. Now I live in a city and I have near-daily access to internet, but it's not particularly fast or reliable by Western standards, and it can be more frustrating than not having any internet at all. 

After dinner last week my Peace Corps sitemates and I commiserated while trying (with some success) to watch a Tina Fey/Amy Poehler clip from the Emmys. We griped about websites too fancy to load properly, apps that don't run on older devices, videos that buffer at the speed of cold molasses, security features that time out and kick you off before you can save changes, Gmail being bizarrely convinced that the PC house's IP address means it's somewhere in Brazil, reading headlines but not being able to click through to the article, giving up on podcasts on mornings when there just doesn't seem to be enough internet to manage a download, laughing at the very idea of streaming anything... It's annoying when you're just trying to read The Onion, but can be a legitimate problem when you're trying to use online databases or Skype in to a conference call. 

And iTunes. Oh, iTunes. I haven't updated iTunes in two years. We don't have iOS 7 - most of us don't even have devices capable of running it - and we're pretty sure that if we download the latest version of iTunes it will refuse to run until we download an iOS upgrade, which we can't do, and so we won't be able to sync our iPods anymore. Or at least that's what happened last time.

Obviously, not having lightning-fast internet is not the end of the world, but it is a constant reminder that the online world was not designed for people living in Guinea. But we make do, we use basic html, we bring books to work to read while webpages load, and we try not to think about how many hours of each week are spent waiting around while that little blue wheel spins and spins and spins. And someday, when we return to the land of high-speed connections, we'll really appreciate it, for awhile, anyway. 

Technical Difficulties

I'm sad to announce that there was a small mishap this week and now my netbook screen has gone the way of my old iBook and more generations of iPods than I care to remember. (My track record with electronics is why I tend to buy inexpensive, used iPods. They're more easily replaced.)

At first the lower right quadrant was still functional, so I could drag windows to the bottom corner of he screen, but the damage spread until the whole screen was useless. Fortunately, the hard drive still works (for the time being) and so this morning I was able to borrow the office projector to get online and a get a few things done. I still have my iPod Touch, si I can check e-mail and Facebook and get podcasts, it's just slower and less convenient, and it's hard to get any real work done on a tiny little screen. 

I'm going to look in to getting a replacement netbook, and in the meantime I'll just have to check my e-mail on the big screen.

Could be worse.