How Internet Access Works in a Soum

A large packet of info about the English Olympics came from Peace Corps. Finally! This thing was probably mailed 2 weeks ago. I leafed through it with much interest. There was a lot of stuff that we could have been using already. Instead, we had mostly been drilling them from Test Master 1 and Test Master 2.

“Look at this,” I pointed out to my counterpart. “Some volunteers have put old Olympics tests on the internet.”

“Oh that’s good. Do you think we could use them?”

“Yes. If I could get on the internet. Then I could print them out and make the students do them for practice.”

“Well, maybe you can borrow the modem and find it. I’m going to my seminar now.”

The “Olympics” (In Mongolian, it’s called the Олимпиад) is a yearly academic competition which falls in March or April around the break between the third and fourth secondardy school terms. Schools select 9th and 11th-grade students (and teachers) to compete in a variety of academic subjects. As a Peace Corps TEFL volunteer, it was my duty to work with my counterparts - the other English teachers - to select and train the students who would compete in the English part of the competition.

These old tests could be the most useful prep tool. If I could download them, then transfer them to a flash drive, put them on the school computer, and figure out how to get the printer to work, I could print out copies to give to the students. I could even time them. It’d be like a real English Olympics! We could keep some copies in our TEFL curriculum book and use them indefinitely. The only cost to me would be disinfecting my flash drive from the viruses that were on the school computers.

But first I had to get online. There were three Gmobile modems in my village. One belonged to a photographer, one belonged to the physics teacher, and one was the “school modem,” which got passed back and forth between the training manager and the computer science teacher.

The next day, Thursday, I went in to ask the training manager if I could borrow it. She thought about it, and said she needed it because she had to file reports on all the graduating eleventh graders, spreading out a stack of wordy papers with pictures of my eleventh-grade students, looking criminals in profiles compiled by the police. (Mongolian students graduate after the eleventh grade.) She offered to give me the modem this evening, provided I get it back early the next morning, because she needed to report on the graduates by then.

“Erm.” That wasn’t a whole lot of time. Under any conditions, the connection would be so slow it would take at least that to take care of everything I wanted to do. I told her to go ahead and keep it, and finish her work. I’d take it tomorrow afternoon. She agreed.

“The school kitchen’s closed and your hashaa family’s gone. What are you going to eat?”

“I’ll cook in my ger.”

“Why don’t you have dinner with us tonight?”

“OK.”

Dinner at the training manager’s house was chaotic and noisy, with five young children running around in a small living room kicking over toy cars. One of the boys had a sawed-off plastic rifle.

“What happened to this?” I indicated the missing barrels.

“No, it shoots better that way,” he told me.

Who takes the time to saw off a toy gun?

The evening ended with us lying on our bellies fiddling with Rubix cubes. I managed to solve one, for the first time ever, by the novel method of disassembling and reassembling it. Why has no one thought of this before? Honestly though, it wasn’t actually that much easier than doing it the traditional way. By the time I was done 3 hours had passed.

I told her husband, the art teacher, in passing that I would finish off my chicken tomorrow. He was really excited by the thought of chicken (or probably anything other than mutton) so I invited him for lunch.

The next day I made fried chicken. I called the art teacher but he didn’t answer. After lunch I dropped some chicken off with his kids and went back to school to do more test prep. I didn’t see the training manager around, so on the way home I went back to the house to inquire as to the parents’ whereabouts. Their oldest son shot off some rapid Mongolian explanation of which the only significant word I understood was the name of another county. So, did they skip town?

Back in my ger, I tried to contact the computer teacher, physics teacher, and photographer, but none of them responded, either to calls or text messages. It was quite possible they were all in the countryside somewhere out of range of the network. After all, the break had started so they weren’t obliged to stay put at school. Obviously, I should find something else to do tonight.

To my surprise, the accountant and training manager showed up at my home while I was sawing wood. They helped me saw. T.M. also told me the modem was at school, locked up, and would it be acceptable to borrow it tomorrow? She was very busy. I agreed. No doubt she did need it more than me.

The next day, Saturday, I didn’t see her. The physics teacher showed up at school though. A very sweet young lady, she poked her head in the English classroom to say, “Hi! Good morning!” After the pleasantry I asked if she had her modem. She gave a Mongolian explanation that I didn’t really understand and suggested I ask the TM. I called the training manager.

I was coldly greeted by a recording: “The customer’s phone is turned off.”

“Yaanaa…” The students giggled at my use of a Mongolian interjection.

Later I ran into the TM again, and was again told to wait one more day. I did. On Sunday the TM’s room was locked all day. I ran into her once.

“I’ll give it to you when I go home. There’s so much work to do.”

“Did you eat the chicken?”

“Yes!” She grinned. “It was delicious!”

“Wasn’t it cold by the time you got it?”

“No, it was fine.”

My students went home to lunch but didn’t come back for afternoon study. There wasn’t much for me to do there, so I was about to leave when two 12-year old boys burst into the room with the modem. As I took it they informed me I needed to bring it back to school at 10AM the next day.

I’d used these Gmobile modems a few times before. I hurried home, because I knew it couldn’t get a connection inside the school. It worked much better in my ger. But even then working with it required skill and patience, because at its best, it was minimally acceptable by American standards. The potency of its signal varied greatly depending on location. I’d discovered from experience that the best spot was in the northeast quarter of my ger about 1 meter off the floor. I began stacking boxes on a chair to bring it to the required height.

Previously, I’d had to install the software and configure it. Then, each time I borrowed one of the three different modems, I had to call the owner to help change the username, password, and other settings, blah blah blah. But I’d saved them all now. So I hoped I could get on quickly today. Nevertheless, I knew there were always some false starts before the connection actually worked.

So it was today. The signal still wasn’t very good. Eventually I got a better signal by raising the computer up a few inches. Now I had to use it standing up. But even then the signal wasn’t very good. It took a few false starts to connect successfully. Even when a strong spot is found and the computer is kept still, signal strength fluctuates quite a bit. And if it’s weak to begin with it will spontaneously disconnect after you’ve connected. This is what happened, several times. I jiggled the position of the computer carefully as I tried to connect. After I connected, the speed was still a problem. My homepage is Google, and several times it failed to load because the computer took too long. At one point I accidentally hit “disconnect” on the modem screen. This is bad, because for whatever reason the modem only works the first time you start it. If you try to connect again after closing it, it won’t connect properly and gives you a “retry” message; you have to restart the computer for the modem to reconnect properly. (Thank goodness this doesn’t apply to when the modem disconnects itself randomly.)

I was relieved when Google finally, completely, loaded. It was now a half hour since I’d plugged the modem in. Now I had to go through that again with Gmail. “The remote computer did not respond. Response time timed out. DNS lookup failed. The server sent no data. Please reload later.” When it finally began to load I rushed to click “Load Basic HTML version” or else I would get stuck in email sign-in limbo. When my inbox came up, it was loaded with stuff, most of which I would never read. I checked about 20 items and clicked delete. Uh-oh. The computer couldn’t handle it. I came up with a blank page. I tried reloading the old inbox, but that failed, and when I clicked back all the way to the Google homepage, that failed too. I had to close the browser and go through the process of opening it, loading Google, and loading Gmail again. And for some reason, I immediately tried to delete more email, which messed up my session AGAIN. Why had I been so dumb? This time it took even longer to start up again, with even more failed attempts to load Google and Gmail. I wasn’t counting, but probably 12 or so. Loading a webpage is like a form of gambling. You hope that you’re lucky enough to click on the link at the moment the signal surges; otherwise, I don’t care, it can slack off as much as it wants while I’m merely VIEWING the page.

When I got back on, I merely overlooked the junk and managed to read several emails. One was about some picture posted on Facebook. I couldn’t load the actual picture, but a lot of people had posted that they hated it. I typed a comment, “My connection was too bad to see the picture, but judging by the other comments, I probably wouldn’t like it.” But it wouldn’t post. So I did it again. And then when I loaded the next webpage, I saw,

“This page could not be loaded because you are not connected to the internet.”

What? Sure enough, I had been spontaneously kicked off. And the signal indicator wasn’t even weak. By now, I’d been “using” the internet for 1.5 hours and had managed to read 10 emails. It hadn’t been THIS bad before. When I reconnected I started slowly moving my computer around. My usual policy is never to move the computer once I get a stable connection because the modem is like a spoiled child and even the slightest change will make it throw a tantrum. But the signal was so awful, it was worth doing anything to improve it. Unfortunately, I only managed to lose it completely. I took the computer outside to see if it’d work there. A little better. But not good enough, and it was getting pretty cold.

I thought it was about time I give up, because there was no way I could get on PBWorks to download the tests at this rate. But I started it up one more time in my ger, and BINGO! It worked. The signal was at the strongest I’d seen it. For the next hour or so I surfed, very slowly, but I did achieve a few searches and found some useful information. And then suddenly the connection dropped, again, for no reason. And I still hadn’t gotten those tests downloaded. After I got it going again, my computer froze. I had to restart it. That brought up a blue screen. “An error has occurred. Blah blah blah. Your stuff’s alright though, so just go ahead and press ENTER to continue.”

I started up, but this time there was no indication of a signal. I stared at the icon on my desktop: EasyWirelessNet. “B----,” I thought. There will be no old Olympics tests to practice with.

And that is how internet access works where I am.