Plane Ride There (Over the Atlantic, June 2009)
I am on Delta Flight 200 from Atlanta to Johannesburg, on the way to the first technology conference in the last absolute monarchy in Africa, the kingdom of Swaziland. The flight is 15 hours across the Atlantic. Somehow flying so far over the churning sea makes my stomach drop, more than if we were flying over land. The woman sitting next to me looks near retirement and is from a rural town in Oregon. She is going with her husband to a hunting reserve in South Africa. I ask her if it costs extra to kill an elephant. Yes, she says, they’ve looked into it, elephants cost $80,000.
In the seat in front of me, 38G, sits Katrina Heppler, a video blogger from San Francisco whom I now officially have met in person. Before I got on the flight, I was not quite sure I hadn’t actually met her in the flesh, since we had exchanged a plethora of tweets before and during the first BarCamp Africa at the Google campus, where she was helping to live blog. I was running around trying to stream video from our panels about social change in Africa, as well as streaming video to Mountain View from no fewer than four African countries in the space of a few hours. I was laden with gear at that conference: Nikon D50, Sony PD100, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Flip, analog-to-digital video converter for translating the official Google video into a web-based uStream video for people all over the world to watch. Our idea was to connect people and opportunities in Silicon Valley and African countries. Continue reading »