"There are oceans and waves and wires between us..."

This was going to be a post about caveats and is even more so now that the 'error on page' has fittingly expunged my first entry. Oops. Before I send this modest attempt at communication out to family and friends, I wish to make a few caveats about the interwebs here in Sierra Leone, and about my own propensities as long-distance communicator:

1. This is not my first blog. I started one in South Africa, where the internet connection is far stronger, and managed to post just two or three times before deciding that life was better spent being lived than being reiterated. The biggest challenge to this blog's success as a portal to my loved ones is that I am its author.

2. The second biggest challenge, of course, is the paltry internet connection in Sierra Leone. Any internet connection, mind you, is a huge victory for a country that stagnated for a few years at the bottom of the Human Development Index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/) and went decades without power in the capital city. That said, every word, every dot or dash of punctuation, and every valiant photo that makes its way onto the interwebs has to squeeze through a flash drive modem that spirits data away to a satellite in the nethersphere that somehow, ostensibly, bounces my musings back down to you. This means that many posts will be waylaid, or ingested by the 'errors' that be.

3. On a related note, text loads more reliably, but I am wont to write much; I would rather let the country and my experience speak for itself through images. I suspect that anything I write will be imprecise and inadequate, and I will regret it at best. At worst, it might get me into trouble. Of course (see above), it takes 20 to 120 minutes for each photo to load. Still, a photo blog is my sisyphusian aspiration. Forgive me if it is painfully spare. Maybe emails will prompt more textual elaboration.

4. I am still settling in (again) here in Freetown, with the luxury of time and my friend's internet connection while she's at work all day. When I get up and running, I'll be where sporadic electricity is a distant dream and hopefully doing better things with my time than watching pictures upload. Which means posts will become few and far between. Still, if this ends up being a front-heavy, 48-hour crush, the few photos it gets to my family makes it worth the effort.

With love, and hopes for more posts,
Zoe