I can remember travelling through South America 35 years ago. There were no internet cafes then. We would instead have our friends and family send us mail care of the various Canadian consulates and embassies. This would also give us a brief repite of clean washrooms, comfortable furniture and old issues of Macleans magazine. Phoning home long distance was prohibitive. But we had elaborate schemes, like calling collect and asking for ourselves, that fooled Ma Bell and reassured our parents that we were surviving.
In my early days as medical advisor to VSO Canada (www.vsocanada.org) , I would frequently get woken up in the middle of the night by a worried volunteer on the other side of the world. The sound quality was usually poor, and it generally took a few calls to get the whole story. Well how things have changed.
Last night’s Passover ensured that our family was at the forefront of cyber simchas. My brother Joel, who has been teaching this year in Cochabamba, Bolivia, was conveniently plugged into our family celebration via the internet and Skype. He “sat” at the end of the table where he had a good view of my Dad who was leading the seder, and he could salivate over the delicious food … the gefilte fish, the meatballs, the veal, the turkey, the stuffing and the kosher wine (which he could have found in nearby Chile). Still no way to download food over the internet, though perhaps smells are not that far off.
And with volunteers in Ghana or Vanuatu who need my help abroad, they can now e-mail me pictures of their rashes, their Bell’s Palsy or all of their lab tests from their doctor’s visit. Phone calls are crystal clear, though there is not yet software to eliminate the 12 hour time difference often encountered.
Part of the challenge of travelling used to be that you were away from your friends and family. While this is still true, cases of severe homesickness requiring repatriation have dropped drastically over my career. And keeping families connected at important times is indeed a great benefit.
1 response so far ↓
1 Joel in Bolivia // Apr 24, 2008 at 4:31 pm
The world definitely seems a lot smaller when you can connect to the Internet at will; and, with a webcam, you can “be” almost anywhere. To have been with my family for Passover both made me homesick; but, at the same time, eased being so far away from my loved ones at home on special occasions like this. Now if we could only email the dinner, things would be just about perfect.
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