[Mostly] successful Skype

Posted by Ali

Wow, last night/early this morning was a whirlwind of activity, but OH so wonderful! So the plan was for Ruth and Jordan to get here by 6 p.m. but they got delayed and got here around 9:30. The minute they knocked on my door and came into my room I nearly felt like I was home. Well, not exactly at home, but back at Southern, which has pretty much been my home for the past three years. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the volunteers at the baby home who have made my first couple months here so great. But there's just something about talking to and hanging out with people who come from the same small community and really miss it, just like you do. Although I'd never gotten to know Jordan and Ruth at Southern (I'd seen them around campus and in SM class, but we'd never talked before coming to Tanzania and meeting up after church), hanging out with them was almost like we'd been friends for years. We talked all about campus, the people we mutually knew and all the news we'd recently heard from Happy Valley. Later on we went to hang out with some of the volunteers at the baby home until they decided to go to bed and then came back to my room and managed to keep each other awake until we made the trek to my office for our test Skype call with Rebeca and Chaplain Brennon.

That initial call went really well, thanks to the wired internet connection in my office. It was so great to see familiar faces from SAU. Pastor Brennon went through his list of questions and we took turns answering them while I typed the questions up so we could look them over again before our real Skype interview. Then Rebeca gave us a rundown of how vespers would work and when we would be called. When she was finished with instructions we asked her to leave the video up so we could listen to the band practice and just watch all the busyness of the preparation.

A few minutes later, near disaster struck; our internet stopped working. Exactly what I'd feared could happen, did. We jiggled the cord, tried the other internet cable, made sure the cords were firmly plugged in to the modem, turned the wall socket off and back on, all to no avail. Then we started getting a bit scared. It was Jordan who suggested we pray. Her simple prayer brought us all peace and we stopped worrying about if the internet would be back. We knew that this vespers service and our participation were in God's hands and he would take care of it all. I suggested we go back to my room and check in my wireless internet was working. I knew the quality of the Skype video wouldn't be as good from my room as it would be from my office, but I figured a bad quality video would be better than no video at all. And we also knew that Rebeca would be freaking out if we didn't get back online soon. The next hour was spent dashing back and forth from my office to my room, trying all the connections, both  wired and wireless, we could. Finally we got a wireless signal in my room and decided to just use that instead of risk waiting in my office for a connection that might or might not return before we were scheduled to Skype. I was extremely thankful that Simon was gone for the weekend or else we definitely would have woken him up with the call, if not with all our talking beforehand.

After some last-minute instructions from Rebeca, Pastor Brennon and an IT guy, they ended our call to see if the video would be better quality later on during vespers. We were kind of sad about that since we had wanted to watch the song service, but it was more important the call went well, so we sacrificed for the overall good. We lounged on the beds until we heard the call and then clamoured into place. When we answered, the IT guy leaned into the camera and whispered, "Three minutes!" We sang along with the final verses of the last praise song and then all of a sudden Pastor Brennon stood in front of the computer and we knew we were on the big screen. From our end, the call seemed to go reasonably well. We remembered the advice from one of the SMs who had Skyped for vespers last year, to wait a few seconds after Pastor Brennon finished his question before responding so that we weren't speaking over top of each other. In the couple hours between our test call and the real thing we had discussed who would talk about each question and what we would say so that part worked out good. The trouble happened right when I was about to answer a question about the albino people of Tanzania. The call froze and I wasn't sure if I should go ahead and talk or just wait until the call unfroze. I opted to wait but then a few seconds after it unfroze the call dropped anyway so once they had called back I had to start at the beginning again. Some of the call was a little bit awkward since we knew that they were having trouble understanding us and we guessed that the video quality wasn't very good (for us, we could hear and see Pastor Brennon just fine), but we made it through the interview OK, even if Pastor Brennon did have to "translate" some of what we said using the notes he had made during our test call.

Our blurry Skype call caught on screenshot
Photo by JAG while webstreaming from Maine

And then it was over and we were waving goodbye to the audience that we couldn't see. The call got shut off and we wished it was still on so we could hear the speaker. While we waited to be called back after vespers so we could talk to our friends, I chatted with Jonathan and Bryn who had been watching the webstreaming of vespers online from Maine and Egypt. They said the video and sound were fine for them so we were encouraged that at least the people watching online were able to understand and see us alright. When I lamented about not being able to see the main speaker, Jonathan suggested we just watch the webstream. Of course! Why hadn't we thought of that ourselves? We quickly started that and were able to see a good portion of the talk, although it did skip around a little bit. After the talk and a lengthy altar call were finished Rebeca called us back and we got to talk to lots of our friends who had gathered at the computer at the front of the church. I even got to talk to my bro for a few minutes! By the time we were done with all that it was nearly 6 a.m. and we fell into our beds half asleep, tired but extremely grateful that we had been the lucky three SMs chosen to Skype for SM vespers!