Yu No Kick Part 5: Digicel

Cell phones, those in international development like to say, are a leapfrog technology. That is, it's a technology that can be implemented more easily than earlier forms of itself and it doesn't require older forms of itself to be in place in order to function. So, cell towers are easier to build than a network of landlines and they don't require a network of landlines to be in place in order to function, thus the land line phase of telecommunications development can be totally skipped. When I first arrived in Vanuatu, communicating with anyone not within shouting distance was something of a challenge. A French company called TVL had set up a very precarious phone network. Phones connected to large radio transmitters that passed their signals over the ocean between the islands and finally fed into a large satellite dish in Port Vila which allowed a slow trickle of communication with the outside world for those few of us desiring it. Often, the transmitters were located in remote areas without access to electricity and thus relied on solar power to function, an energy source that can become decidedly scarce should it be raining a lot. Phone cord also tends not to last long in the bush, where it is baked by the sun, corroded by the rain, and chewed on by rats, and thus phone cables were often held together via arrangements that made duct-taping seem like a shockingly sturdy and long-term solution. Technicians were also usually less than thrilled to travel to areas reachable only by machete-wielding adventurers to make repairs. But there they'd be, incongruous as palm trees in Alaska, these off-white desk phones, looking like they'd come straight from Office Depot (they even had speed dial), nailed to the side of community centers or housed in little bamboo and thatch huts which you could, if you really squinted, call phone booths. Those phones were a promise, a tenuous glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, you might be able to talk to someone outside of your village. That, if it hadn't been raining too much and if the piece of cloth holding the phone wire together continued to function properly, you might just be able to talk to your parents in the US or, if you were really lucky and happened to own a laptop, log on to Facebook and update your status.

TVL made money by charging for plastic, pre-paid phone cards with long numerical codes on the back covered by lottery-ticket style scratch off goop that you removed when you purchased them to reveal your number, which you could then punch into a phone to access airtime. It cost about $5 for the cheapest card, which earned you about ten minutes of talk time. After being prompted for the number you wished to call, a friendly voice would come on and inform of how much time you would be able to connect to said number on your current phone card. The thing was, TVL employed a complicated billing system where the phone charges were based on the time of day, the day of the week, the island that you're calling from, the island that you're calling to, and whether or not it's a good day for yams at the market; the bottom line being that sometimes you'd connect to a number and be granted fifteen minutes to talk and sometimes you'd connect to the same number and have four. You just never knew. Sometimes calling cards were used as a substitute for currency. For example, I once heard a story of a woman buying a baby using phone cards, which I thought was strange because not only did it imply that someone had negotiated the purchase of a child, but that they didn't have the common decency to at least use an actual currency when doing so.

TVL eventually branched out into cell phones as well, but there coverage was rather spotting as you could only use your cell phone in about 10% of the country. You couldn't really blame them for this though, given what a pain it is to build and maintain cell towers. The tower on Malekula, for example, required a forty-five minute hike through the bush, up a rather steep hill to reach, which really isn't that bad if you're just carry a bottle of water and maybe a few snacks, but if you're carrying, say, the cement to build a cell tower with, it starts to look like a real pain in the ass.

When I first got to Malekula, a new phone company, Digicel, was in the process of building a network of cell towers across Vanuatu with the ambitious goal of providing coverage to over 70% of the country. Unlike TVL's towers, however, which were small, simple affairs which relied on terrain (ie. hills) to provide the height needed to broadcast their signal, Digicel's structures were huge, towering monstrosities (at least for Vanuatu), and they were going up all over the country. It was an uphill battle and one that I, when I saw it began, thought was doomed to failure. For one thing, building a large tower that will remain standing for a long period of time, even in the presence of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, requires a quality of workmanship that is mostly absent from Vanuatu. For example, the concrete cinder blocks made on my island are so incredibly shoddy and low-quailty that it's entirely possible to break one by stepping on it (which, as you can image, makes me feel really good, given that I live in a cinder block house). To get around this problem, Digicel not only imported the cement (the chemical ingredients used in making concrete) for their towers, but also the sand and water that went into the making of their concrete blocks.

The launching of the Digicel phone network was the biggest thing to hit Vanuatu since independence. Actually, no, the Digicel launching was the biggest thing to hit Vanuatu, period. And it was accompanied by an ad campaign that would have been right at home advertising the release of a new kind of Doritos chip back in the States. They imported who knows how many gallons of red and white (Digicel's logo's colors) paint and sent people up and down all the islands painting everything that they possibly could red and white. People's huts out in the middle of nowhere became Digicel advertisements. So you'll be traipsing through the bush and all of the sudden come upon a little thatch roofed store with DIGICEL written in large, white letters on the side. They wrote theme music, got celebrity endorsements (no mean feat considering that there aren't any celebrities here). The national newspaper sold them their front page for several weeks running. As in, the front page of the newspaper contained not a single bit of news but was one, giant, Digicel ad. They even put a highway-style billboard up in Lakatoro, conveniently large enough to read while you're speeding by in your car. Now all we need are some cars to speed by in. On launching day in Malekula, they rented a truck and decked it out with speakers and banners and drove up and down the island blasting Digicel music and giving out hats. I wondered if someone should try and explain to them that, in order to sell phones in Vanuatu, all they really had to do was, you know, have some phones to sell.

Needless to say, cell phones were an overnight success in Vanuatu. Even the crazy guy who sings outside of our general store got one (although his is a broken one that someone else threw away). The basic Digicel phone model is a black-and-white screen job, which I like because it's simple, functional, and easy to use, but especially because it has a little flashlight on the end of it. In my mind, this is really the only cell phone extra that's actually useful in Vanuatu (or anywhere, really. I actually saw the flashlight phone on sale in the US when I was home for Christmas. I was trying to sell my brother on it when he was shopping for his first cell phone, but with little luck. “Hey Nick, check this one out, it has a flashlight on it!” “But it doesn't even have a color screen or an enhanced keypad and it doesn't flip open or slide or do anything.” “Yeah, but check it out, it has a flashlight!”), although it can lead to complications when you're using it to walk around at night and someone calls and you have to choose between walking and talking on the phone. Of course, people in my village quickly discovered the many and varied features of the fancier phones, including the MP3 player, the camera, and the video recorder, all of which are pretty much totally useless without a computer, but no one seems to mind. I soon became pitied in Tautu as the one, poor guy still using the cheap-o, uncool phone. Even the crazy dude's broken phone is a fancier model than mine. I usually end up getting the last laugh, however, seeing people walking along at night, hunched over low so as to allow the light from the large color screens of their internet-capable camera phones to illuminate the many potholes in the road.

I think leapfrogging is an appropriate image for the arrival of Digicel to Vanuatu because, while Digicel may cover over 70% of the country, things like electricity certainly do not. Originally, Digicel sold their phones with little, red solar chargers which, as anyone who's ever used any kind of solar charger knows, are totally useless. Eventually this plan was abandoned and thriving cell phone charging businesses have sprung up all over the place. People with it enough to own generators or to have large solar setups charge $1 per charge to charge a cell phone. The stores in Lakatoro, who all run on the power grid, charge similar rates to those who want to use their outlets to charge their phones while they're in from the out villages. Given that charing a cell phone uses probably a maximum of ten joules of energy, I think this is a pretty brilliant businesses model.

Along with the lack of electricity, many Ni-Vanuatu also suffer from a lack of anyone to call. Not to be deterred, however, some adventurous Ni-Vans have taken to simply dialing random combinations of numbers and trying to strike up a conversation with however answers. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone gets married to a person they met while randomly punching in numbers on their phone one afternoon. For all I know this has already happened. This practice got even worse when Digicel started offering this service where you can send a free text to a friend requesting that they call you back. Whereas before randomly calling people cost money, now you can randomly text people for free and see who calls back. I get at least four such texts per day. Adding to my daily influx of phone spam are special offers that Digicel texts out to all their customers, things like “Make a 20 minute phone call today and make calls for the rest of the day for free.” Helpfully, they will sometimes send out three versions of each message, one in English, one in Bislama, and one in French. For a while, the whole concept of a special offer was a little shaky in the village and so I was having to do a lot of explaining.
Ni-Van: “What does this Digicel text mean?”
Me: “Well, if you make a phone call that lasts longer than 20 minutes, all your calls for the rest of the day are free.”
Ni-Van: “So if I talk for twenty minutes today, I don't have to buy phone cards anymore?”
Me: “No, only calls you make today will be free. Tomorrow you have to start paying again.”
Ni-Van: “So I talk for twenty minutes and then it's free until tomorrow?”
Me: “Yes.”
Ni-Van: “What if I use my brother's phone?”
Me: “No, just the calls you make on your phone.”
Ni-Van: “But what if mine runs out of battery?”
Me: “You know what, just forget about it.”

Ni-Vans are also absurdly bad at accepting the fact that they've dialed a wrong number, or maybe it's just that they don't really care if they actually end up talking to the person they're trying to call, I don't know, but the bottom line is that I get a lot of conversations like this:
Me: Hello
Caller: George?
Me: No, sorry, I'm not George.
Caller: But I'm trying to call George.
Me: Well, I'm not George, sorry.
Caller: Is George there?
Me: No, this isn't George's phone, it's my phone.
Caller: Who are you?
Me: I'm Daniel, sorry, not George.
Caller: Do you know George?
Me: No, I don't, I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong...
Caller: Where are you on?
Me: Malekula, look, I...
Caller: No, George lives on Pentecost, this should be Pentecost.
Me: Yeah, I'm not George. I”m Daniel, I'm on Malekula, look, try...
Caller: Could you get George for me?

But what's worse is when you hang up on them and they call back.

Cell phones in Vanuatu seem like some kind of alien artifact that some UFO accidentally left a bunch of behind when they were visiting earth. They're so out of sync with everything else that's going on in the country. Stores in Vila have even started selling iPhones so that you can get directions to the nearest nakamal with on your cell phone with MapQuest (Continue STRAIGHT for 200 meters on THE ONLY ROAD ON THE ISLAND, then turn LEFT). Digicel has even activated the GPRS network, allowing phones with internet capability to get online. Just last Sunday I was sitting on the beach watching Duncan and some friends grind a batch of kava. We were struggling to find a bucket in which to work the kava and a rag with which to strain out the grinds when I was asked if I knew of any good websites to check out. I turned around and was faced with a bright, color, cell phone screen displaying the Google homepage. I was flabbergasted and for a while could not think of a single web address. Finally, one popped into mind. “Try http://www.nytimes.com,” I said, and watched as the guy painstakingly typed “http://www.nytimes.com” into the Google search bar. “No,” I said “that's a URL, you don't put that in the search bar.” “What's a URL?” he asked. I sighed. Technology is a strange thing.