The residents of Tomono, a rebel-held village in the northern Ivory Coast, have long used an elaborate system of note-passing to communicate with the surrounding region. People write letters, then wait by the cratered dirt road for the rare truck. They hand the note to the driver, who throws it out the window at the prescribed destination hours later. Children chase the fluttering paper through the reddish dust kicked up in the truck's wake and deliver the missive to the proper hut. The system seems haphazard, but it's better than nothing.
Then one night late last summer, Kolo Soro, a 30-year-old elementary school teacher, reached for his cell phone to look up a number. He'd bought the phone to use during his time off in Korhogo, a much larger, cell-friendly city. "When I turned it on, it rang," he says. "I was completely shocked."
The signal was spotty, coming from a tower 20 miles south. Soro walked through his house with the phone held in front of him like a divining rod, looking for the best reception. He found it about 7 feet off the floor in his bedroom, near the door. So he hammered a nail into the ceiling, attached a string, and used it to suspend his phone in the signal's sweet spot. He plugged in an earbud and microphone, moved all the furniture out of the room, and announced that Tomono's first telephone booth was open for business. Elders came by to call their city-dwelling children. Rebels fighting in the civil war that has engulfed the country since 2002 stopped in to ring their headquarters. At 80 cents per minute, Soro made $200 his first month.
With the additional income, Soro trekked almost 350 miles to Abidjan, the country's biggest city, and bought a $420 PlayStation 2. After taking a few days to figure out how the thing worked, he hooked it up to a Sharp 13-inch color TV and opened a mini-arcade on his front porch. For 10 cents, villagers could challenge a friend to three rounds of kick boxing; for 20 cents they could try soccer. Soro made $20 in just the first three days.
I lived in Tomono as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-'90s and visited again a few months ago. One night, I wandered by Soro's front porch. About two dozen people were crowded around in a vague semicircle, everyone facing the glow of the screen. In the dirt yard behind them, a family of ducks waddled around under a mango tree.
I sat down for a kickboxing bout with a young man everyone called Bass. I'm not much of a gamer, but I'd certainly spent more time playing than anyone else there. Sure enough, with Bass mashing all the control buttons at once, he quickly fell behind. But Bass observed carefully. Soon, his combination of curiosity and eagerness was thumping my experience.
After the game, I asked Soro what was next. "I want to buy a computer," he said. "I've heard that you can use a cell phone to get on the Internet."
— Austin Merrill
credit: Jack Unruh
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