Calling from Africa...

The plan was to talk to my parents on the phone using skype tonight.

Me in Sierra Leone and my parents in the USA.

Unfortunately it was not an easy task.

First of all we have had national power all day but it has been cutting out every 10 minutes.

I tried to watch a movie in the afternoon but had to restart dvd every 10 minutes.

I decided to request 2 hours of generator time so that I could use internet.

And planned to call my parents during that time.

However, that’s when my computer started acting up.

First of all my headset gives me trouble- skype does not recognize the microphone.

So when I call someone, they cannot hear me.

After about 30 seconds into the call I get a signal to change a setting and then it works.

So, I got that sorted but then next thing I know though, my computer freezes and I have to restart it.

It stayed frozen for an awfully long time and I wasn't able to restart it initially.

Twenty minutes and a bit of worrying later I try to call my parents again.

We managed to get it about 7 minutes of conversation of which I could only hear every other sentence.

Highly frustrating.

I hung up and tried again.

4 minutes into that call, in which the connection was still very bad, our power goes off.

The guards switched off the generator and we were back on National Power.

I tried calling again.

At least this time I could hear my parents but then the power fluctuations started.

From that moment onwards the power went off and then on again about every 2-3 minutes.

So, in the end I actually called my parents 9 times.

Basically in a time span of 22 minutes I made 7 calls with an average of 98 seconds per call.

The shortest call was 8 seconds, the longest was 2 minutes and 23 seconds.

Not much time to get a whole paragraph or words in there.

So, despite many efforts, in the end, we still haven’t really talked.

We will try again tomorrow!

Hopefully we will be on generator or national power will be better behaved.

(PS: I will be impressed if I can get this entry posted on my blog tonight!)