(the beginning of construction for a new cell phone tower that will give signal to us and several residents in two nearby valleys).
Background to help with the significance of this:
-the telephone company is a huge cash cow for the government who owns and regulates it.
-until recently they have not licensed any telecommunications companies to come into this country, (this includes internet/satellite/cell phone)
They opened the door briefly and through it jumped Digicel which competes against the telephone company run B-mobile.
Further background:
land-rights is a very difficult proposition here. Culturally a man can sell you the rights to use an acre of his land for say, a cell phone tower (a tower is what your cell phone connects to and gets it's signal from). But those rights tend to need repaying whenever the land owner needs cash. Say he sells you the land, in 5-10 years his son is grown, inherits the land, and now wants his share, only now, it's more money.. and so on and so on. If they get unhappy, they tear down whatever you put on the land.
So Digicel installs these fortress like towers. Tall cement block walls topped in razor wire, with huge generators inside in case they cut the power source. Digicel knows what they're doing, and because they can negotiate the tricky cultural swamp of land rights, they have towers all over the country now.
Which means, instead of it costing me $3.00 p/minute to call home, it will cost me $0.33 cents p/minute to call home, for roadside emergencies, what have you.
AND.... digicel has implemented GPRS, which means, for those smartphone owners (not many of those around here) you can get email and map information now.
What does this mean?
It means that technology that the U.S. has enjoyed for nearly ten years now, has finally begun to arrive here! And that means communication is more affordable.
AND that also means translation data will flow.
Scenario A: the translator takes his laptop, goes to his village, spends 2 months recording audio data, and typing in books from the Gospel. He has no way to backup or email his data, so he takes his laptop back to our centre to store it on servers and send it back to the U.S. for processing. Only on the way, he's held up, and they steal his laptop. 2 months of work gone. This is a SAD scenario and has happened more than once. Or say not held up but the canoe tips over, his laptop falls to the bottom of the sea. This has happened.
enter GPRS or other technology that reaches the village:
Scenario B: they do their work, they email it off, it's stored instantly and safe. No work lost!!! YAY!
This is why I get excited about technology. Not because it means I can do new (well old to me) and exciting things, but because it has a real life application that furthers the spread of the Word.
