Scanning a Document in the Two-Thirds World

Last week the director of my school of communication back in the U.S. asked me to sign, scan, and email a letter to him. Sounds simple enough, but I soon realized the request makes several assumptions that one can't necessarily make on this side of the world.

To sign a letter you have to first print it. To print a letter you have to have electricity.

We experience several power outages every day, for varying lengths of time. Thankfully, the campus has a generator that usually kicks on after a few minutes to deal with interruptions to the power supply, but our electricity was off for one 7-hour stretch earlier in the week.

After printing a letter you have to have a working scanner.

None of the departments I am associated with here have a working scanner so far as I know. One department did scan something for me awhile back, but it took about 30 minutes per page. In this particular case, I recalled hearing a rumor of an individual in a nearby flat who had a personal scanner. She graciously scanned the letter for me, but her scanner could not collate multiple scanned pages into single document, so I ended out with a separate pdf for each page.

After scanning a letter, you have to have working Internet to email it.
Our Internet on campus is intermittent at best. Frequently it’s out for an entire day at a time, and when it’s on there’s little bandwidth. Even as I write this we’ve not had Internet for about fourteen hours.

So it turns out that signing, scanning, and emailing a letter is a significant life event.

There are many other issues like this about which one can’t be certain on a given day whether they will be possible. When we lived in Nairobi, for example, water was never something you could count on. During one particularly bad drought we went without a drop of water coming into our house for 19 days. (Californians, don’t expect any sympathy from us!) The same uncertainty surrounds transportation, being able to locate products in the shops when you need them, and so on. This isn’t unique to UCU. In fact, life at UCU is relatively cushy what with the generator, indoor plumbing, and all. So I'm not complaining. This is just how life is in parts of the two-thirds world, but it makes a difference in your general orientation toward accomplishing these things.

In the U.S. you know just as surely as the sun rises every day, water will fill your sink and shower, electricity will flow through the wires into your home and power your microwave and hot water heater, when you log in to your email account you will instantly be able to communicate with the world, and if you go to buy a product (unless you were looking for an iPhone 6 last October) it will be on the store shelves. In east Africa you can never be certain from one day to the next how things will go, so you have to be flexible. East Africans are amazingly resourceful. They have to be.

I wish I could say God has cultivated in me that sort of flexibility and sanguineness of approach during my time here, but I'm not sure if I've learned my lesson well yet. This morning, though, I'm just grateful the Internet came back on a few minutes ago so I can upload this post!

Photos:

1.  Monkey walking across power lines to the house next door. The cumulative effect of that little trick caused a brown out at our house for three full days.

2.  A herd of mongooses in the yard today. Has nothing to do with the topic, but I thought it was cool. Black mambas are native to this area so the more mongooses the better.