Meetings

Shortly after I arrived in West Africa, I was told by an older PCV to always bring a book, my cell phone, and plenty of credit to any meeting I attended, so that I'd have something to keep me busy. I remember being slightly put off - it seemed so disrespectful, I imagined that I'd want to be attentive throughout any meeting to which I was invited. But that was before I found out just how long it can take for a meeting to get started here, and also just how long it can last once it gets going.

Disclaimer: It is often worth it to go to meetings, and important things do happen at meetings, so it's good to pay attention. It can also be helpful to have something to do for the hour or three before things get started, and to have something on hand to help you stay pleasant during the more frustrating parts.

That being said, here are some things that I would include if I were making up a game of Guinean Meeting Bingo:

• Things starts at least two hours later than scheduled 
• A host country national complains loudly about how nothing ever starts on time 
• A host country national complains that the punctual people aren't giving others enough time to talk
• At least six cell phones go off 
• At least two people answer calls and have a conversation about how they are in a meeting
• Someone hands out plastic folders containing gridded notepads and blue ballpoint pens
• There are at least three fake fruit and/or fake flower bouquets in the room
• It is approximately 95°F/35°C in the room but it feels so much hotter
• The guy in front of you falls asleep in his chair
• A local official shows up, accompanied by an armed soldier, to declare the meeting officially started
• Lunch is served at 3:30 PM or later
• Someone hands out cans of tepid orange Fanta
• Someone asks if you are married 
• The power goes out and it takes at least 20 minutes to get it sorted out
• A long period of time is spent reading text from PowerPoint slides
• A supposed professional says something wildly inaccurate, i.e. "Fistula is a women's problem caused by HIV."
• Someone says "We are running very late so I will be brief..." and then talks for nine minutes
• Someone says "We have already thanked everyone many times..." and then thanks them all again

Oh, meetings. I can't say I'll miss them, but I will miss commiserating about them and trading never-ending-meeting stories with friends and co-workers, at least a little bit. 

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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.