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.
