Technology Education Part 2: Cell Phone Revolution

  Computers aren’t the only big technological change people are adjusting to in my site. Apparently there weren’t any cell phones at all in Santa Lucía until 2006. In the span of a few months, the people of this small mountain town went from a telecommunications environment resembling something from 1940’s rural America, to the cell phone-saturated, internet-age situation they’re in today. I’m told cell phones literally appeared overnight.

  Before 2006, the entire town, maybe even the entire municipality, used one telephone. That’s right, there was just one public landline in the whole town, and it had to serve at least all 5,000 residents living in the central town area (if anyone knows how to translate casco urbano better than “central town area,” please let me know).

  Five years ago, the majority of telephone calls in Santa Lucía were made to or from relatives living outside of the country. Nicaraguans have had a long tradition of leaving their country and families behind in order to find work, most popularly heading south to Costa Rica, and as a result, they’ve also had a long tradition of calling back home.

  The one telephone in town was located in the Claro office (Claro is one of the two telecommunications giants in Nicaragua; the other one is Movistar) and it was operated by a guy named Osmin. Actually Osmin still works in that office today, but now he has much, much less to do.

  Back then, Osmin manned the one phone day and night, fielding all of the town’s calls. The majority of those were from Lucianos working in Costa Rica or the United States who wanted to talk to their relatives still living in town.

  So Osmin would pick up, and the person on the other end would say, “I want to talk to so-and-so and I’m going to call back at such-and-such a time,” and Osmin would say something like “Dale pues, está bien,” which translates loosely as, “Alright, cool,” and then it would be his job to track down that family member and tell them what time to come to the telephone office to receive their call.

  If you can imagine it, the office was full of people all day waiting for their relatives to call. Of course sometimes they wouldn’t call and there was no way to find out the reason. If everything worked out and you were able to receive your call at the allotted time, you had to talk in front of everyone else waiting there in the office. Nothing was private.

  It is absolutely amazing to me that the ability to communicate freely with the outside world is just five years old here. The only thing that might tip you off that there was ever just one telephone in Santa Lucía is the true fanaticism people have for their cell phones.

        Everyone under the age of 50 has a cell phone. Everyone. No joke, I know people who live in houses made of clay and sticks who use Blackberry’s.

  There is only one thing that Nicas love more than talking on their cell phones: and that’s texting on their cell phones. Just like how in English we’ve invented the verb “to text,” in Spanish they’ve invented the verb “chatear.” I text more in Nicaragua than I ever did in the States and it’s because the Nicas have an apparently unquenchable thirst for chateando.

  But I digress…back to that period of unimaginable change that swept through in 2006…

  In that year Claro apparently undertook a large expansion into some of the more rural areas of Nicaragua in order to tap into a new market (a naïve and un-tech-savvy market that I’m sure the execs at Claro were itching to exploit) and Santa Lucía was on their list. They say that even before the big red and white cell phone tower was completed, (now a prominent feature of the town center) a fleet of bright red Claro microbuses with loudspeakers on top descended on Santa Lucía and basically gave out free cell phones.

  The salesmen didn’t have to work too hard to make a veritable youth army of cell phone carriers in a single day. The phones they gave out didn’t have the chips (SIM cards) they needed, but there wasn’t service so it didn’t matter yet. Claro didn’t even start selling the chips until there was service. So people started buying cell phones without SIM cards and without service just for the novelty of having a little screen with the date and time (which of course also functioned as a handy flashlight) and a couple of games.

  Once the antenna was finished and people could finally make calls, Claro continued their exploitation not only by charging for the SIM cards, but also exorbitant fees. All of Claro’s cell phone business is pay-as-you-go, and the more “minutes” you buy, the longer they last. That is, if you buy 20 córdobas worth of “minutes” (they use the world saldo here) they might be good for 2 or 3 days and then they expire. If you buy 50 córdobas worth of saldo it might be good for 5 to 7 days before it expires.

  Using a cell phone here is a constant game. Claro has promotions every few days where if you buy saldo on that day, it’s doubled or tripled, and you can save up bono (or bonus minutes). There are also deals where you can get free text messages if you send a certain word to a certain number. You can even send saldo to a friend so they can text you.

  Oh and there are two different saldo counts, one for calls and one for texts…and this is all just among Claro phones, so if you want to call or text someone who has Movistar, you have to pay three, four, or five times more. It’s definitely true what everyone says, the people at Claro are ladrones (thieves), and they’re always inventing new ways to exploit.

  So, the horrible greed-driven business practices of Claro aside, where there used to be an aching lack of communication there is now a profound surplus of it. Santa Lucía skipped over some infrastructural telecommunication milestones that much of the industrialized world had to pass to be as developed as it is today. To go from one telephone to thousands of cell phones literally overnight is quite a jump and the culture is still adjusting (maybe overcompensating) to the change.

        And in fact, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any landlines in Santa Lucía today…but they did just install 3G.

Technology Education Part 1: Virtual Faith

This is a special two-part post on technology in Santa Lucía. This first part is about my experience helping Nicas with computer skills and the second part will be about the town’s telecommunication history.

Sometimes I think about the fact that I can type like this: fast… I can almost type at the speed of my thoughts! And so I’ve found myself reflecting on how technology is implicated in the culture of my site…a place so rural in many ways but infused with a healthy smattering of the Internet age.

Recently I’ve been helping Nicaraguans (very informally) with basic computer skills, and it strikes me how much these skills have become, for me, second nature. For many Nicas, especially the rural schoolteachers I’ve been working with, the concept of doble clic is utterly new and foreign. It really puts into perspective the privileges I’ve had in having access to computers and technology all my life.

My dad has always had a computer…the first one I can remember was a Packard Bell raging a Windows 3.1 operating system and about 0 RAM. I was maybe 4 years old, playing around with the mouse and keyboard, delighting in the sights, smells, and sounds of the machine. That same computer eventually ended up in my room, and although it couldn’t do much, it could run Solitaire, Paint, and Oregon Trail.

(I was usually a doctor by the way, I started in May, and I always caulked and floated. Oregon Trail also taught me the words “grueling,” “strenuous,” and “cholera,” and that killing buffalo is easy.)

All throughout elementary and middle school we had to go to computer class. I can even recall that in 3rd grade, in addition to learning basic skills we were introduced to a brand new technology called “laser discs.” Later on in 7th and 8th grade we had actual typing classes. We were taught where on the keyboard to put our fingers and did exercises using a special program to develop muscle memory and typing etiquette.

  Not that my generation necessarily needed classes like that…

  As middle-schoolers we could run computational circles around all of the computer teachers, who for some reason always seemed to be in their 60’s. They were just so excited to be teaching young minds about this important new technology. What did it matter that they had to consult the textbook to change the desktop background from a picture of the band Korn back to the standard Windows blue?

  The point is, I’ve had so much experience with computers in my life that I didn’t realize how much of a complicated subject it can be for someone who hasn’t had any.

  Some things make sense of course, like the concept of drag and drop, but other things are quite counterintuitive, or at least subtly complicated. For example, why do you have to click on “Start” in order to shut the computer down? What is the functional difference between “Save” and “Save As?” One click or two? Left or right? How many “New Folders” can you make? (Apparently an infinite amount?)

  All of these things have been basic questions posed to me by the Nicaraguan teachers I’ve been working with. I admit that before helping them out, I had taken those things for granted almost as inherent knowledge—as something direct and sensual like seeing or smelling or touching—not something to be learned…and certainly not something to be studied.

  In watching and helping Nicas learn to use computers, I’m realizing now, on more than just an intellectual level, that what computer skills do is to essentially virtualize your otherwise very concrete experience. Your corporeality becomes transformed and translated; your fingers, hands, and arms (usually appendages that effect physical change in the world) become a dexterous and super-sensitive little arrow that flies around on a screen in a virtual space and does your virtual bidding. It opens, closes, cuts, copies, pastes, drags and drops.

  None of these incredibly evocative verbs does anything concrete however. Instead they’re an abstraction, operating metaphorically in an invisible substrate of 0’s and 1’s. I can only imagine how much of a paradigm shift in thinking it must be for these teachers, having to learn as they’re doing to believe in this virtual space.

  For my American peers and I (and now the youngest generations in Nicaragua), we never really had to transition from thinking concretely to thinking virtually. We grew up interacting with and thinking about computers; for us, our faith in the virtual isn’t really a faith so much as it is just another mode of understanding and relating to the world. But for the middle-aged rural Nicaraguans just learning computer skills, their learning experience must feel like quite a leap of faith.

  (As a side note, it would be interesting to do a study or something investigating the connection between faith in a religious sense and the kind of faith someone needs to have in order to learn to believe in the virtual space of a computer…)

Stay tuned for part two of Technology Education and learn how cell phones changed everything overnight!

• Technology Education Part 2: Cell Phone Revolution