Staying Connected to the World

Living in rural Africa with minimal access to mass media and frequent prolonged cell phone outages, the world frequently shrinks to the size of our town, with everything beyond walking distance of our home fading into a blur of rumors and random updates.  TV viewing is limited to the set in our teachers' lounge, originally bought for the World Cup, where Janet occasionally catches episodes of the 2008 season of Oprah rebroadcast on Angola's TV Zimbo and we sometimes watch national news programs from Mozambique or Angola, but most often Brazilian soap operas dominate our small screen.  This year's smash hit is 'Os Mutantes,' a Latin soap opera version of the X-men.  We can always tell when it airs because to get in and out of the teachers' lounge, where our colleagues jam pack the chairs and couch, we have to negotiate thick ranks of kids thronging the doorway to steal glimpses of the typically over-the-top plot lines and amateurish special effects.  The particularly exciting end-of-the-week episodes can even delay the start of classes or exams.  With zero access to newspapers or browsing internet news sites, our only real window to the larger world outside our community is the radio, which we listen to for multiple hours a day.   We keep our little solar powered wireless permanently tuned to the BBC.  Living right on the border, we get continuous clear reception on the FM broadcast from nearby Blantyre, intended mainly for Southern Malawi listeners.  Most of our Peace Corps Mozambique colleagues can only get such quality English language news if they have short wave, and even then its sporadic.  There is no real competition on our dial from the other mainly Chichewa language stations.  Our neighbors don't understand why we don't tune our radio to the local music, but we already get plenty of that whenever electricity isn't out thanks to the many crackling speakers playing the same few Chichewa songs loudly beyond their audio capacity throughout town.  Over the past year we've followed plenty of world stories on the BBC, ranging from tragedies, like the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and the torrential floods in Pakistan, to the farcical, like the BBC's attempt to interview Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim, to the latest music fads in British nightclubs with the weekly Tops of the Pops.  Airtime for sports favors British pastimes, with Cricket World, in depth coverage of the Commonwealth Games, and all the latest on Manchester United's woes with their temperamental striker Wayne Rooney.  Luc did get to hear updates on the Lakers' championship run last season, which he would anxiously wake at 5AM to catch live. There is zero baseball coverage, although we hear we didn't miss much with an abysmal showing from our hometown Dodgers.  The most compelling story this past year for us has been that of the 33 Chilean miners trapped for so long deep underground.  At times we felt like we were down there in that pit with them, cut off from the world in complete darkness under hundreds of meters of solid rock.  Perhaps everyone has moments when they feel like this, or perhaps it has something to do with us being so far and isolated from home here in Africa that prompted us to identify with these men during their ordeal.  We shared their elation when rescuers finally pulled them free from the earth, imagining our own joy when we finally arrive home for the holidays after over a year on the far side of the planet.  Recently we heard the budget for BBC World Service has been eliminated as part of the coalition government's severe austerity measures, but hopefully this doesn't mean the end of our precarious tether with the larger world.