FOR IDJWI, AN ISLAND ON THE RWANDA-DRC BORDER, ISOLATION HAS BEEN A GIFT.
Idjwi – For many of the world’s 7 billion people, it would be hard to imagine a world without the Internet. In just a couple of decades, our lives have become so intertwined with the World Wide Web that it’s difficult to remember a time when it wasn’t part of our lives. For the youngest among us, the world simply hasn’t existed without it.
But for the residents of Idjwi Island – a tiny place located on Africa’s Lake Kivu right between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda – it is not the absence of the Internet that has been hard to imagine, it is the presence of it.
Until last August.
I watched the installation of the very first satellite dish in the garden of our hospital, like a flag symbolising a global infiltration of some kind, with a mix of excitement and trepidation.
This marked an enormous change in our community’s connection to…