ktravula – a travelogue!

I’ve not always been this tall. No, not at all. It has often amazed me too when people look at me more than once and, without being able to help themselves, blurt out their thoughts in the words of “Oh, you’re so tall,” or as I’ve heard from so many familiar people who have indeed seen me a countless number of times, “Oh K, you were not this tall the last time I saw you!” Now, that is sometimes either annoying or intriguing, depending on my mood when I hear it, but my response to them has always been the same within rumbles of laughter: “Oh, nevermind,” I say, “It’s because of these new shoes I’m wearing.” But it has always been a little more than intriguing, not about the fact that I’m growing taller – I am not. I’ve stopped growing since over seven years ago, I believe – but because I was not always this tall. In actual fact, I was quite a smallish person in my secondary school. Those who went to the school with me will gladly corroborate this fact, and this common argument within us friends that I would never be able to drive a car because I won’t be able to see the road ahead of me. Needless to say, most of them are now almost just half as tall as I am. History is on my side. Hurrah for gravity! 🙂

It wasn’t always likely that I would have spent half a year in one of the world’s biggest telecommunication’s markets – the United States of America – without a mobile phone. Surely, six months ago, I couldn’t have envisioned my current position. Two feet away from my left hand at this moment is a telephone that could only remind me of Nigeria. Not even the current day Nigeria, but the Nigeria of 1990. The telephone is hooked into the wall via a transparent cable. It has a dialing pad attached to the receiver, and it doesn’t have an answering machine, and it has a coiling cord that always used to give me nightmares. The last time I came across a phone with this kind of winding cable connecting the receiver to the box was in my grandfather’s house in the early to mid-nineties when we made the best of times by making prank calls to local Fire Stations and police stations telling them of a raging fire. I therefore could not immediately believe when I walked into my designated apartment back in August that I was indeed in the United States of America. It was a kind of culture shock to come in contact with a land line phone of this ancient kind. There is usually a three-lettered abbreviation to respond to this kind of encounter. I went with OMG!

Cut to six months later, I have survived it, I’m proud to say. My little nephews and nieces who are used to Nigeria’s now ubiquitous mobile phone services might be shocked now to see that phones exist in this kind of form. The only reason I can think of why I backed down from my promise to buy myself one of either the Samsung Omnia, the Nokia Maemo, the Apple iPhone, the Palm Pre, the Google HTC or the Blackberry among so many others new inventions competing for attention then was the contract system that made it a prerequisite that one had a payment plan with a major telecommunications network before getting a good smart phone. No can do, I said to Apple, which was my very first choice, and effectively walked away from the rest. For phone calls home, I depend on Skype, and Rebtel. For text messages, there is Skype, and my good old smart Nokia that followed me across the ocean. For calls within campus, there is my good old ancient line now hooked to the wall. It works just fine except I manage to step out of the room when the incoming call rings. Needless to say, the non-possession of an American-network-powered mobile phone has never failed to generate very long conversations within friends and acquaintances whenever I bring it up. “Why don’t you just buy one of those little mobiles that you can recharge and use at will without a contact? Walmart has them,” I’ve been told. “I just can’t care less,” I respond, “In Nigeria, you can just walk up to any shop and buy a sim card without a contract, then buy the kind of smart mobile phone you wantar contract and still get all the services you require; a service you can walk away from at any time without loss. In America, it’s well almost an impossibility without a certain discomfort.

I am a true Nigerian ghoul in the American forest.