Technology

Moving to Indonesia has provided an opportunity to consider the electronic tools upon which we rely, and to unplug a bit from our pre-mission state.

Over the years we have been satisfied and perhaps a bit smug about the way that our T-Mobile phone service has supported us in every country we visited.  We get a welcome text at the airport or border when crossing by train.  Texts and 3G were free, with voice calls at 20 cents a minute.  It was great.  But U.S. customers cannot keep using their phones overseas; they will be cut off after 30 days.  A phone number can be put on hold, but only for 6 months.

So a few weeks before we left town, I switched my phone to Google Voice. For a one-time $20 USD fee, I could keep my phone number.  Texts and calls to that number go through automatically, and their voice-to-text transcripts are pretty good, saving a lot of time.  I can make free voice calls from that number through the computer, which has been helpful for a lot of customer service issues.

I had intended to buy a local sim card for my iphone, but didn't appreciate that my iphone phone had not yet been unlocked, which was a major hassle and at one point they said I would have to make up a backup and restore.  No big deal.  Except that I apparently accidentally hit the encryption button, didn't remember entering a password, and could not re-install.  So I lost all my contacts, notes, etc. (Sanford learned from my experience and had no problems.)

It was actually good to clean up the apps, which I had intended to pare down anyway.  But it was like losing part of my brain to lose the rest. We are so dependent on these electronic aids!  But I now have adequate voice, text and data for $12 per month. And a smartphone is helpful because on the days our driver does not work, we get around by using a ride service called "Grab" (think Uber).

I am the acting medical coordinator for the entire mission until our new mission president comes in July,  No problem talking to the missionaries across all the islands, but if I have to consult an MD, he is in Hong Kong.  I am not sure I could figure out buying an international phone plan, so I am using Google Voice on  the computer and paying 2 cents a minute for the international call.


That brings us to the matter of computers.  I was an early adopter of a 2-in-1 "transformer" book that can be used as a tablet.  I bought my Asus at the beginning of 2015, and it came with a full version of Office, which I needed for my work at the time.  It is a very lightweight machine, and another plus is that the charging cable comes apart so that it can be charged from an external battery pack.



I imagined using this as a tablet when we were teaching people, to show videos, etc.  But the volume on that machine is not really loud enough to show a video to more than one person, and the battery is not lasting as long as it used to.  So right before leaving, I bought a newer one with an all-day (11-hour) battery life and good volume, as well as lots of other bells and whistles like the fingerprint sign-in.  And we are using our tablets for teaching a group of kids up in a kampung (neighborhood) an hour away.

I had not realized that our other classes would be taught using a television to display, and I would need a cable that connects my micro-HDMI output to a HDMI input.  We spent part of a Monday going from store to store looking for a cable but could only find an adapter.  It didn't work, and I wasn't sure if it was the adapter or a setting.  I tried various things that were recommended from the web, and uninstalled a driver from the newer computer that pretty much killed it.  I wasted a couple of hours and stayed up too late fretting, and then decided that the older compute would have to do, and I was not going to obsess.  I put it away for two weeks, partly because we were so busy and partly to prove that I could live without it.  Most of my work was saved to a storage card.  I popped it out of the new computer, put it in the older computer, and kept going.

Of course if we were at home we would have ordered the HDMI cable from Amazon.  That got me to thinking and it turns out that there is a company here called Tokopedia.  We had the cables two days after ordering, just as we were getting ready to leave to teach our Friday night class.

A few weeks later we did take the damaged computer in for repair.  Although there are maybe 100 stores in town with an ASUS sign, I looked up an authorized repair facility on their website.  There were only three.  The one near us ultimately agreed to fix it under warranty, although I lost everything. But I was nervous while we were waiting, seeing this sign.  The current slogan for Asus is, "In Search of Incredible."  So the slogan they have up is a bit dated, and there is a mis-spelling that did not inspire confidence. But in the end it was fixed for free, so I am glad we went there.

This picture is also typical of how various religions are integrated in Indonesia.  The worker on the right is wearing a black jilbab head covering, sign of a devout Muslim.  The woman on the left is not.  They seemed to get along well.