Africa – Welcome to the 21th Century

I have left TCDC and the WIFI heaven and have moved to the Kilimanjaro region to work at Marangu Hospital as an Engineer/Technician for one month.

Marangu – our new hood

We no longer have access to free WIFI at TCDC and there is no WIFI at our hospital or new home. Michelle, my hospital partner, and I have therefore found it necessary to investigate how up-to-date Africa is on the internet front.

In a place where people have almost nothing it might seem surprising that practically every native Tanzanian has a smartphone with access to internet – including the Masai tribe, though a lot of them still live in primitive houses made of clay and wear culturel simple clothes – they cannot not live without their smartphoness.

In order to avoid theft we have been advised against using our smartphones and EWH instead provided us with some old phones – some of them do not have colour screens. I feel thrown back into time and I rather enjoy my old simple phone except…it does not have internet access.

Our EWH phones. Michelle has a Nokia and I have a Samsung

Some use their western smartphone and therefore have access to internet on their phones but one has already been stolen and we are advised against using them. Michelle used to use her iPhone but her charger broke so now she also uses her EWH phone.

Since we did not access internet on our phones we were looking for a different option and then we discovered that we could buy a modem for our computers. Africa – Welcome to the 21th Century!

My airtel modem – Michelle has one too

We use the simcards from our phones and have now bought extra data – we bought the biggest package – 20GB for 30000 tshs, which is around 15 dollar and we now have internet wherever and whenever. When we want internet we simply remove the simcard from our old phones and put it into the modem and plug it into computer – easy as ever.  The only downside is, that every time you remove the battery from our old phones you have to reset the time, zone and date. We are therefore permanently on African time, which basically means, that we do not keep time – at least not in a western perspective, but time has its own rules down here!

It is quite easy to buy simcards here since everyone has a phone. A simcard is around 2000tshs (Tanzanian shillings), which is around 1 dollar. You then put money on your simcard – or I should say.. you have someone else put money on you card since everything is in Swahili and the telecompanys do not provide English service. With money on your card you can buy a weekly or monthly bundle. I have a monthly bundle for 10000tshs (around 5 dollars) that includes around 2.5 hours talk and 5000sms, 80 mb data and now…with my additional purchase…20GB data.

We use Airtel because they provide the best service in our area. Other popular brands are Tigo and Vodacom.