Internetting

The world today is an amazing place. In a town that often has no running water and where many of the houses lack roofs or walls and washing machines are unheard of, you can still walk 20 minutes down the road and login to find out what the rest of the world is up to. It is one of the few activities I can do here that is at all familiar - even sleeping, showering and laundry having taken on new meanings (I have never before had such neatly ironed underwear or spent so much time at the well).

You do need plenty of time however: my own internet connection at home invariably doesn't work as fast as I'd like it to but here it is not uncommon to wait 30 minutes for a page to load (or not load at all). Best to go armed with a book. Emmason, the internet place, is a room with over 20 computers in it and a small office. It is very cheap - about 1 Ghana Cedi (approx 60p) for an hour, but you don't achieve much in that time.

If you do get onto your chosen site, typing becomes the next challenge: the keys are usually sticky and do not always produce the expected effect. They frequently swap places with other keys and this week my apostrophe disappeared completely. I had not appreciated how handicapped you can be without an apostrophe!

There are a couple of fans on the ceiling which cover quite a few of the work stations but if it is not working or you are at the wrong computer you just have to sweat it out. There really is considerable dedication required!

Most excited to find free internet available last weekend at our hotel in Lake Volta I hoped to catch up on a few e mails without having to watch my money as well as my time slip into the cybervoid. However, after maybe an hour of enduring the small electric shocks that jumped from the computer when you got too close to it, several episodes of shutting itself down when the plug was jiggled too much and waiting at least twice as long as you do at Emmason even, my enthusiasm was waning.

The weekend in Cape coast was more fruitful internet wise -there was a cafe next door to our hotel which advertised fast internet. I went on Saturday morning to enquire about opening times.
"we open at 2pm"
"great, and what time are you open until?"
"we are open 24 hours"
!
It was indeed open late though and my scepticism was unwarranted - it was excitingly speedy: every page loaded within a minute and the only hiccup was a solitary power cut!