We are very thankful for modern technology and the many benefits that it brings to missionaries – much faster travel times, international calling cards, and especially internet.  In the last couple weeks we’ve bought Christmas presents, borrowed electronic books from libraries in the States, researched recipes, caught up on world news, and video chatted with our parents. All on the internet.

It’s been an especially good couple weeks for internet.  Not all weeks are this good.  In fact, we keep screen captures of some of the more bizarre things that happen to our internet.

The cause of most of our internet issues is a very slow connection.  In this test of data being sent from Lilongwe to Nairobi, our connection got an F.

Could we upgrade from our “128kbps-shared-with-the-neighborhood” plan?  Well, sure, but not at these upgrade prices.  Not when we had 6Mbps for $45 a month when we lived in California.  The 6Mbps option isn’t even available to us, and if it did exist, it would probably cost $1800 a month.  No, thank you.

(Uploading a 3 minute video to YouTube.)

So our internet is slow, if we have internet at all.  We’re writing this post on a WordPress remote poster program that a friend of ours designed specifically for us.  We don’t need to be online to compose any of the post or even add pictures, we just need to have about 3 minutes of internet when we’re ready to post.  Or rather, when we have about 3 minutes of internet, THEN we post.

Often we’ll start downloads at night when we go to bed.  Having a download manager program has helped (we use downthemall, a plug-in for the Firefox browser), because even if the download gets interrupted, it will pick up where it left off.

We liked this one especially, because it thanked us for our patience!  They were a little off on their time estimate, but they were nice about it.

But sometimes things just don’t come through because of where we live.  Like videos, or…

Logos?  Apparently Google Malawi doesn’t get the Google logo.  Oops.

And sometimes EVERYTHING comes through, though we’re pretty sure we’ve never had quite that many messages in our inboxes, ever.  So if  you ever wonder why it’s taking us so long to reply to an email you sent us or why we haven’t noticed your Facebook status, we may be buried beneath 4 billion emails, or maybe our internet is down and we’re sitting on our porch enjoying the first rains.  =)  Sometimes our lack of internet is just what we need to remind us to stop and enjoy those moments in the wonderful, mostly-offline place where we live!