If only I could …


    WICOMICO CHURCH, Va. – “We want to know what you think. Text message us at ….”

    “For more information on this story, go to our website at …”

    Every day, as I sit in my house in Renk, Sudan, and listen to the shortwave radio, I hear those lines: “Text message us …” “Read more about it on our website …” “Get more information online …”

    And I think, literally every single day, “If only I could.”

    If only …

    The world that is wired constantly tries to lure people into that wired zone.

    But those of us who live outside the wired world – in developing, poor nations where e-mail is practically non-existent, where mobile phone networks work only sporadically, where having electricity is a privilege and landline phones are too expensive to maintain – those of us in that world can only listen and wonder what it would be like to be wired all day, every day.

    I know what it’s like: I am an American. I have lived most of my life in the United States, in an increasingly wired world. Here I have a mobile phone and a computer and wireless capability, as well as a landline phone that works all the time, access to broadband, access to just about anything I wanted or needed. The only thing that ever stopped me was the cost.

    But now I live in Sudan, a country just emerging from war, where we measure progress by how far the new highway – the first built in Southern Sudan in a quarter-century – has come. It’s only 45 minutes north of Renk, the small town where I live. Last year at this time, it was two hours’ north. That’s progress.

    (At the moment, I am back in the United States for two months of preaching and teaching, and I am reveling in my access to the wired world.)

    All over Sudan, the mobile phone industry is exploding – more and more people have mobiles, and at least three new companies have landed contracts in the country in the last year alone. But there is a problem with the mobile network: Demand has outstripped supply. More and more of us having phones means fewer and fewer of us can make calls at will, because there simply are not enough network towers to transmit our calls. Somehow, both the landline system and the mobile network are tied into each other, so that if one is down, so is the other. Which means that if I want to make a call in Sudan, even just across town to talk with one of my colleagues, I frequently have to dial 12 to 18 times just to get through. Even that is not a guarantee of success – it is not unusual to have the network crash for hours, even days at a time.

    As for e-mail access, well … that’s another thing that is not a constant. In Khartoum, the nation’s capital, e-mail is very accessible. It’s amazing, in fact, how many Internet centers (which have yet to evolve into cafes) exist.

    But get outside of Khartoum, and reality slaps you in the face.

    For a while in Renk – two months – I had somewhat regular Internet access via my landline. I could dial into a service provider in Khartoum, paying an exorbitant long-distance rate (one month, the phone bill was $250!), and get e-mail on a quasi-regular basis. But after two months, that quasi-regular became quite irregular. Now, nearly a year later, there is no access at all. The phone lines between South Sudan and North Sudan are not sufficient.

    Now, if I want e-mail, I have to get on a public bus, ride three hours north to a town in northern Sudan, transfer to another, local bus, transfer again to a small “rickshaw,” and pray – pray! – that when I finally arrive at the Internet store, the Internet actually will be working and there will be electricity to power the whole thing. Usually, something has gone wrong, which necessitates a long wait until suddenly the network is re-established or the power returns. Then, I have one to two hours of Internet access at a very slow speed, after which I have to get back into a rickshaw, then a local bus, then the long-distance bus to go home. If I’m lucky, the whole thing takes only nine or 10 hours. Sometimes, it can take up to 15 hours. All for one hour on the Internet, which rarely is enough time to get all of my messages, or to respond to those that have come in.

    In other words, access to the outside world is limited.

    And I’m one of the lucky ones, one of the privileged people in a land where almost no one has a computer, much less both a landline and a mobile phone.

    So when I hear those requests to “text message us at …” or “e-mail us at …” – requests I hear up to a dozen times a day on the shortwave radio – I wonder if those who are making them even realize that many, many of their listeners have no ability to do so.

    People in the wired world tend to forget that most of the world is unwired. The majority of people on this planet earth have no ability to text message, to e-mail, to go online, to surf the web that is in no way “worldwide.”

    We in the unwired world want to participate with the rest of the world.

    We want those relationships that blossom through the computer and the mobile phone.

    But we don’t have that ability.

    We don’t have the money.

    Heck, we don’t have the electricity!

    The only thing that can keep this troubled world from blowing itself to bits is the building of relationships with the “other,” the person far away who is different, who is not “us.” When we know each other as real human beings – and contact through the Internet as well as by phone is a very good way of getting to know you – then we don’t hate each other as much. Less hate, less war. Pure and simple. The “worldwide web” has done a great job drawing more and more people into relationships that span time zones and national borders.

    But there is a whole chunk of the world that is being left out, that is not able to enter new relationships, that is sidelined and ignored and, quite frankly, all too frequently forgotten.

    The wired world needs to help bring the unwired world into the fold. It needs to help build the networks that promote understanding and relationships.

    That way, there won’t be millions of us saying, every single day, “If only I could …”