My house is a two room brick structure surrounded by concrete with with a tin roof. It has intermittent electricity, and there’s no wi-fi to be found. So how do I manage to blog from my rural Rwandan village?
Here’s what I have in the way of technology:
- a simple laptop, case, and charger
- SIM card for buying mobile data bundles
- a smartphone I bought in Rwanda
- a USB to micro-USB cord
Gone are the days of firing up the laptop, connecting wireless-ly to the cloud, and writing while also uploading and editing photos. Gone are the days of having 10 tabs open at once. After some months of trial and error, these are the steps I now take to produce one blog post:
- Charge the laptop fully either while having electricity or at the health center.
- Draft and edit blog posts at night in a Word doc.
- Plug phone or storage drive into laptop and grab images for said blog post.
- Walk 4 miles (uphill both ways –no snow–) with laptop, cell phone, and USB drive into Huye, go to the nicest Catholic boarding house around [or second option a coffee shop with spotty wi-fi], buy a Fanta or milkshake depending on my location, add mobile data to my phone, and take a seat.
- Set up a hotspot
- Copy and paste posts onto WordPress, upload photos and add tags. I usually upload a month of posts at a time and set the to auto post every Sunday.
I can, and have, written and published many posts entirely through my phone. I prefer to type on a computer for quantity and quality writing.
This set up works OK… Not great…Not perfect but it gets the job done. I for one will be glad to returning to the land of Starbucks and free wi-fi sooner rather than later.