Times are Changing

Back when we started out in Guatemala in the '80s, we had no telephone in our village. Communication was done by old fashioned postal service, unreliable though it was. I'll never forget the time Jim went to the big city for a meeting and errands, and got delayed by car trouble on his way back. He had no way of contacting me, and I could do nothing but cling to the Lord for reassurance and peace until he finally arrived, a full day and a half later than expected.

Coming to Oaxaca in the 90's, we had a telephone, but no direct outside line. It was more like an intercom connecting us to the local missionary base. For long distance calls we would ring up the operator in town, who would connect our call by switchboard like Sara on the old Andy Griffith episodes.

Later we progressed to the old-timey "party line" which were long since obsolete in the US by that time. When the phone rang, everyone on the block (for lack of a more descriptive word of our neighborhood) picked up the receiver to see who the call was for. Those were fun times, especially when our Zapotec neighbor children wouldn't hang up the phone while we were talking, and we could hear them giggling on the line.

Eventually Telmex allocated more numbers to our town, and we got our own private telephone line. Non-missionary kids today have no idea what "dial-up" internet connection refers to, but our kids vividly recall the days before push-button phones (let alone cordless!) became the norm.

And speaking of dial-up, it was a happy day when internet service was first offered in Oaxaca. The only trouble was that we had to place a long-distance call to Mexico City in order to connect. By the time Chris and Tim were in junior high, I was determined they should become more familiar with the computer and internet.

Somehow along the way we learned of a toll-free number for connecting to Compuserve, so I allowed the boys unlimited time on the computer to work on research papers. In Mexico, the phone bill you receive is actually charging you for calls made two months earlier. By the time our bill arrived, we had rung up fees of $500 and $600 in U.S. dollars for calls we discovered were anything but toll-free! Ouch! That hurt.

Fast forward to the 2000's. Today we have high speed wireless internet in our house that even works most of the time. We have a special voice-over (Voip) "Lingo" phone connected to the internet which allows unlimited calls to the U.S. and Canada for talking directly with our three boys up there. We even have Skype for talking with Hannah in the Philippines using a webcam so we can actually see her as we talk. It's just like the "phones of the future" my dad and I gawked over at the State Fair of Texas back in the '60s!

Yes, the future has arrived, even in Oaxaca. Perhaps the clearest picture I can show you is one I have yet to capture on camera. Rural Zapotec farmers in local villages now carry cell phones while they manually plow their fields with oxen. Why, you ask? In case their children call them from the states!

Yep, no doubt about it. Times are changing. I for one am thankful.

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