Feeling Very Global in Small Town Africa

We may be in small town Africa, but our lives seem ever more connected to the rest of the globe.

After we arrived we were awaiting our household items to be shipped across the Atlantic. At the same time we were eagerly anticipating our cars arriving from across the Indian Ocean. Although we've never been to Japan, we bought two used cars there, and shipped them to Botswana.

Then there's the weekly shopping on Amazon. We have access to everything we could buy in the States--and I always preferred online shopping anyways--we just have to wait a couple extra weeks for it to arrive in the "diplomatic pouch." (This is a magical pony express that uses a US based address to allow us to ship things to and from Botswana for the same cost--to us--as doing it from suburban Virginia.)

And now that we're up and running, we are connected through communication. The embassy issued me a blackberry with global data and voice. So when I traveled to Egypt a couple weeks ago I had email in the airport in South Africa and called Amy every night from my hotel in Cairo. I couldn't help thinking that some of the "developing" world has simply leapfrogged over some stepping stone developments we take for granted in the US. Where very few people even today have landline telephones, there is an exploding part of the population with phone and internet in their pockets.

It's the magic of the internet that allows us to have a Connecticut based phone number so we can make and receive unlimited US calls for $40 a year.

So when these things work, we feel pretty connected and global. It's just that they don't always work out as expected and we have to remind ourselves that we're here for more than the conveniences we left behind in the "developed" world.