Simon Elero guards Amref's Katine office, where internet and mobile phone coverage can be patchy. Photograph: Richard M Kavuma
When the diesel generator was switched on and wireless internet installed at Amref's Katine office in February, it felt almost surreal. You are in a village without power or running water and suddenly you are connected to the web. As one Amref staff member mused: "Isn't it wonderful?"
If I had not appreciated how wonderful it was back then, I certainly did when the internet failed to work last month.
The first time it happened, I had arrived before 9am ready to send an article to my editor at the Guardian in London. But Internet Explorer could not explore any page, despite all the connections appearing to be right. I clicked several times and waited several hours, but it was all in vain.
I consulted Chris, Amref's IT guru but he was just as helpless. He hoped it would work sooner than later. Apparently the "machine" that was supposed to distribute IP addresses was not doing it, forcing the satellite to take matters into its own hands - and doing a poor job of it.
The Amref office in Katine sub-county is at least 21 dusty, bumpy kilometres away from Soroti town, which has a few internet cafes, so if the satellite doesn't cooperate, you might miss crucial deadlines.
When my editor called from London and learnt that the internet had been down, our concern was about the next day, which was the Thursday before the four-day Easter weekend - making it an early deadline-day. What if the internet failed again? How would I send articles to London?
My London editor, Mark, suggested that if the worst came to the worst, I could read the story over the phone and he would write it down. Great idea. But one problem remained: I could not send photos by telephone, so we were back to square one: hope.
In the end, hope was enough, the internet worked and all deadlines were met. What a relief it was when the last article was sent.
Since then, I have become wiser. When I have a deadline to meet, I try to send the photos the evening before via an internet cafe in Soroti town. But even that can be difficult. Once, the Uganda Telecom (UTL) network went off suddenly so I headed to my usual internet cafe near the Golden Ark Hotel on Soroti's Main Street, but the internet (again, provided by UTL) was also down. So it remained for the entire day. I tried two other cafes and they were all unable to get me online.
Fortunately, other phone networks were working. So I bought myself a new SIM card from Warid Telecom, the latest entrant into Uganda's burgeoning telecom market, and was at least able to make and receive calls.
But in the country, you can't even take the phone network for granted. It goes down frequently and the company has never apologised for the sporadic inconvenience. It is not unusual, for example, to send a text message on Sunday and it to be received on Tuesday.
In Katine, the network can be so unreliable that you can lose reception simply by facing the wrong direction. So when I am in the field office, I have to place my handset strategically - on top of a filing cabinet. When it rings, I grab it, stride to a leafy tree near the Amref office and answer the call. I have to stand under the 'magic tree' to lower the risk of losing the connection.
Once, during a phone conversation with Mark, it became so windy that we could not hear each other. When he called again, the wind had passed and the call was incident-free. That is no different from other villages. In fact in extremely remote villages, people have to climb trees to tap the network.
Fortunately, I have not had to do that in Katine. Yet.
