We Go Without Internet for 2 Weeks …

One Saturday, about 3 weeks ago, we woke to find we had no internet. We weren’t all that concerned initially, as these things happen from time to time.

Sunday: still, no internet. Then I thought it would be a good idea to check to see if we had actually paid the account, which, as it turned out, we hadn’t. Somehow with moving and the general confusion, we thought it wasn’t due for another few weeks.

Monday, we head down to the internet office bright and early to pay the account. The cashier tells us that the internet will be re-connected within 15 minutes of payment.

So, we happily head for home, assuming the problem is all sorted. Alas, on getting back, still no internet. We’ll give it a bit longer, we say, as sometimes these things don’t happen straight away.
Tuesday, still no internet. By now we are thinking we need to go down to the internet office again, and feel we need to get the assistance of someone with better Spanish than us, so we call up the friendly brother who helped us with organising to rent our apartment here in Otavalo and off we all go to the internet people.

We explain the situation to the helpful internet lady, who prints out a work order and gives us the assurance that a technician would be there in the next day or two.

Then we go to a park in town that has free wi-fi to check whether we have any urgent emails. Nothing pressing, and the world is still turning without us, so we send off a couple of quick emails to explain our absence from the world wide web and head home.

(The photos in this blog have nothing to do with the topic, but add some colour to an otherwise black and white page!)

Siesta time by a river in Cuenca
 

Wednesday afternoon, we get a phone call (in Spanish of course) from the technician, who asks something which I cannot understand, and then says he will be at our place in the morning.

Thursday morning, and on into the afternoon – no technician.

Friday afternoon, we again head to the internet office (without our translator, but with the help of Brendan’s electronic tablet, set to “translate”) and endeavour to explain the problem.

The internet lady is helpful and offers “a thousand apologies” for the technician who said he would come but did not, sends an email to the supervisor of technicians, and again says someone should come Saturday or Monday. So, we stay home. By this time we are getting pretty fed up with being stuck at home, as previous to the whole internet debacle we had been home sick with a cold virus for 2 weeks.

Friday evening, we put our laptops in our backpacks and walk 5-10 minutes to a friend’s house, who lets us use their internet.

On Saturday, Brendan suggests seeing if our Ecuadorian landlady can talk to the internet people and see if that does the trick. Apparently she had been having problems with her internet too, and to make matters even more interesting, we realised the address on the work order was not correct. Addresses in Ecuador tend to be pretty vague at the best of times, but we thought that with an incorrect address, the technician didn’t stand a chance of finding us.

So, our landlady said she would go down and see them on Monday.

She must have known what to say or who to ask, as we finally got an answer that sounded promising.
The story is that the internet company are changing the lines to give better internet service, and that someone will come out in 5 days’ time to do so. And that we should be at home for them to come.

We weren’t sure if the 5 days would be the Friday or the Saturday, so early Friday I went to see our landlady to see if she knew anything further. She did, and that was that we now have a new landline number (which we didn’t know we had!), which she gave us. The problem was, she wrote the number down wrong, so then we had to find someone who had a landline (only 15% of homes in Ecuador have landlines) and who also had Caller Number Display, ring them from our new number, and have them tell us what our new phone number was!

Cows on the moooooooove

Naturally, the internet man didn’t come on the Friday, so Saturday Brendan stayed home while I went in field service. Just before I left to catch the bus, we got a phone call from an internet technician (in Spanish, naturally), and as far as I could work out he was asking, “did we have a problem with our internet, and was someone at home now?”, to which I said “yes” and “yes”. And then told Brendan excitedly that as far as I could work out, the internet man was coming, and it sounded like almost immediately.

Later in field service, around 10.30 am, I texted Brendan to see if the man had come and did we have internet. “No”, and “no”.

As the day wore on, we started to wonder, what had actually been said on the phone this morning, and was my Spanish really that bad?

But then around mid-afternoon, there’s a buzz on the intercom, and it’s the daughter of our landlady, who has walked the internet technician around the corner from their place to ours.

So, while letting the technician in, I excitedly give Brendan the “thumbs-up” sign, and we assume all our internet woes are at an end.

The technician goes to the modem and checks it, and tells us that it’s not the modem, it’s an outside problem, in the cables, and that someone will come on Monday to fix it and that someone needs to be home to verify that it’s working.

By now, Brendan is definitely not a happy little Vegemite, as we say in Australia, (2 weeks of no internet is wearing his patience thin) and after mutterings about “I could have told them it wasn’t the modem”, etc etc. we resign ourselves to a few more days of internet silence.

Photograph of a painting we saw in Quito

Monday, we stay home (again), and in the morning, while doing our meeting preparation, we hear a noise from Brendan’s laptop, which he checks and then says, “we’ve got internet!!” Fortunately, we had practically finished our study, as we could hardly contain our excitement.

If this dependence on internet sounds a bit pathetic, try living in another country for a while where, without internet, your distance contact with others in the same country is reduced to mobile/cell phone texts or calls (not always the best call quality), landline calls within the same state or province (our landline is not set up for interstate/intercountry calls), and as well, contact with your home country is now zero.

Things we take for granted, such as on-line banking with your bank back in your home country in order to transfer funds to Ecuador to pay the rent and buy food etc, now require a visit to a friend whose internet works. And anything that needs to be attended to back home gets left undone and you don’t even know it. Plus, many expat Witnesses here work on-line, and without decent and reliable internet, it’s going to hit them hard financially.

I also use Google Translate quite a bit, rather than a Spanish-English dictionary, to check on words or phrases I need to know, and without internet, that was not available either.

We have friends in our congregation who have been without landline and without internet for 4 or 5 weeks now, in spite of going down to the internet office numerous times in order to get the problem fixed.

We’re just grateful that our landlady (who is also a Witness) took up our case, as without her help, I think it likely we could still be without internet.

I think I’ll suggest to our internet-less friends that they borrow our landlady and let her sort out the internet people for them!!

Indigenous dress in Otavalo