From the Editor
Margaret Sadler | Editor-in-Chief, news&views
Technology and Me:
Around the World and Across the Decades
Thanks to the Edmonton Public
School Board’s deferred salary leave
plan, my husband and I lived overseas
for three separate years over a
seventeen-year period. We’ve always
enjoyed marking the technological
changes across those years abroad.
In 1992, I carried a clunky laptop
and a dot-matrix printer in my
suitcase. A phone call to family was
rare. We sent and received letters
by mail, and in case of emergency,
there was a fax machine available to
us at city hall in Nayoro, our small
Japanese city in Hokkaido.
In 2000, I carried a sleek turquoise
laptop and printed documents from
a colleague’s offi ce in Nouakchott,
Mauritania. We checked our email
every morning in her offi ce. It took
three months, but eventually we
had a phone line installed in our
Nouakchott home so we could receive
email and call family, if needed.
In 2007, a slimmer laptop
accompanied us to Phnom Penh,
Cambodia, where Wi-Fi availability
in our offi ce and very quickly in our
apartment facilitated email, Skype,
and phone access to the rest of
the world.
I always thought that
communication was the most
important technology to me in
those years away from family and
friends, but of course so many other
technologies aff ected our lives. Power
and water, food and health care were
all supported by unique technologies
in each country.
Power ran dependably in Nayoro.
That was the only location where
we ever needed heat and that was
supplied by a Kabec heater, burning
kerosene. During the fi rst power
outage in Nouakchott, we rushed the
contents of our small freezer over
to a colleague’s. We only did that
once. The power always came back
on, eventually. Wavering light levels
continued throughout the year. We
learned to report “Le courant est
coupé” to our landlord in Phnom
Penh; it wasn’t surprising, considering
the tangle of wires connected to power
poles outside our windows.
In the advanced country of Japan,
we lived in a mother-in-law suite with
one tap (at the kitchen sink) and a
pit toilet, attached to but outside the
heated space of our living–eating–
sleeping room. In Mauritania, one of
the poorest countries in the world,
our villa had fi ve toilets (only a few of
which worked) and water came into
a cistern in our compound through
pipes from an aquifer in the Sahara,
about 100 kilometres east of the
city. We were very mindful of water
use, there between the Sahara and
the Atlantic. In the bustling city of
Phnom Penh, both bedrooms in our
apartment had ensuite bathrooms;
our drinking water came in twenty
litre jugs, but we brushed our teeth
with tap water.
In the rural setting of Nayoro, we
ate local produce — fi sh, potatoes,
Kobacha squash, the sweetest
greenhouse tomatoes — and fruit
imported from southern Japan. After
a while, we accepted that apples
cost C$5 each and enjoyed one
occasionally; they’d probably been
grown individually in paper bags that
allowed in just the right amount of
sun and moisture. In Nouakchott,
animals were butchered and the
meat sold out of the trunks of cars
(not that we bought ours there),
fresh vegetables arrived by plane
from the Canary Islands, and few
Mauritanians ate the amazing fresh
seafood that a fi shmonger brought
to our gate. In Phnom Penh, some
grocery stores carried foreign foods
like peanut butter, but we shopped at
the Old Market at the end of our block
for fresh vegetables and a stunning
variety of fresh fruits, season by
season.
There’s nothing like travel to expose
one to the range of technologies
available to others. ●
“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as
if for the fi rst time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”
– Bill Bryson
news&views WINTER 2019 | 9