How Long to Fix a Broken Phone Line in Uvita, Costa Rica? 65 Hours

Let me first say that I'm not complaining. I'm happy to be online again, and enjoyed helping the ICE repairman today. My wife and I had a three day vacation in Uvita, Costa Rica free of our modern obligations and didn't even need to leave home.

We noticed that the line had gone out 6pm on Saturday. This happens from time to time, but when there was still no voltage or dial tone Sunday morning, I decided I had to act. I walked the part of the line on the property, and it did not look visibly damaged.

The next thing that ran through my head was, "My landlord didn't pay the bill this month?" So I called the ICE bill information number, and the computer told me there was no payment due on our number.

I called the ICE number for reporting a phone outage, and I dialed in our phone number again to report the outage. The computer voice repeated back that someone would call us back within twenty-four hours. Monday morning, indeed, a woman called the cellphone and verified the complaint, then told us a gentleman would call us back shortly.

Three hours later, indeed, a gentleman called back and said he'd be here first thing the next day (Tuesday, today) - "mañana en la pura mañana."

Sure enough, at nine today, the ICE pickup truck drove up our driveway. The repairman optimistically came into the house with his replacement ISDN unit, hoping the problem would be easily solved without breaking out the work gloves. Alas, I had already tried all the simple solutions inside.

So we again traced the line 100m through the property, and it did not look bad. But along the boundary, the phone lines went through about twenty meters of jungle vines. The repairman headed down the road in the pickup to check the signal at the junction box, and I rolled up my sleeves, climbed the trees, and cleaned out all the branches and vines with my machete. The one wasp nest came down easily, and I did not get stung. A few ants did get me, but overall it was uneventful.

I gave up waiting after five minutes and headed back to the house to get out of my sweat-drenched work clothes and eat; I managed the former, but just before I was about to eat lunch, Milyn saw that the repairman was back climbing the post outside.

I headed back out, and the two of us worked together to replace the line. Apparently, the voltage out of the junction box was quite good, so there was some nearly-invisible corrosion somewhere in the 700m inbetween our property and the junction box. We started replacing line, one pole at a time, always testing to see whether we had to continue or could tie in to the existing line. We always had to continue.

About two hours later, we had replaced the entire 700m. We found the fault, only about 20m from the junction box, at a place where the wire crosses the road. Although it was quite high, it was clearly scraped by some vehicle and had been subject to corrosion.

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On another local note, as soon as the line was fixed, the line rang. It was the police (Fuerza Publica). I was at first optimistic that they were finally returning the call to setup the time for the free English lessons I had offered them. But no, they were asking for a donation to buy some meat to put in the rice for their party tomorrow night. "Con mucho gusto," I assured him. So tomorrow somebody will come by and I'll give them 10,000 for the meat and whatever else they can get with the change.

A friend of mine was probably right when he told me they would never call to follow up about the free English lessons: it's just too much work to learn English, and they don't want to put out so much effort.

That's OK, I suppose. I'll contribute in whatever way they want, and I'm honored that they gave the me the chance to contribute something.

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