Letters from my grandmother
How to make an international call in 2001
It involves multiple letters, emails, phone calls to Bell Telephone Co. and someone better not be using the internet.
When I was growing up, my family lived in some far flung places. My Canadian father moved to Namibia shortly after university and started working as an engineer at a uranium mine. He met my mother, a German-speaking Namibian who was born and raised on a sheep farm. My younger brother and I were born in South Africa. We emigrated to Canada in the early 90s, then later to Papua New Guinea and Trinidad before returning to Canada over a decade later. When I was twelve, I attended an all-girls boarding school in Brisbane, Australia, while my parents and brother were still in PNG. During the year I was there, my grandmother wrote me an extensive series of letters.
This series will be my attempt to capture her voice and the time, the magic in the hand written letters and the daily events of life in Southern Ontario 20 years ago.
February 6/01
…We are getting a special card from our Bell Telephone Co. that enables you to call us and only us and we pay for the call. It will take a week to here and then another 2 to get to you. It is cheaper than phoning us collect and you can use your other cards to phone PNG.
Feb 13/01
… I am enclosing the “Family Contact” card from Canadian Bell Telephone system. The Canada Direct #’s enable you to dial directly to us — after punching all the numbers. It can only be used to call us — Please use it whenever you feel the need. —
[Undated ~ early March]
…Grandpa has sent you an Email with all the details of conversion from Australian time to Paris, Ontario time — Don’t worry too much about waking us up as we will be happy to hear from you.
This is the first letter mention of an email being sent, but by no means the last. I have letters from other school friends that year also mentioning, “ I will be sending you an email shortly, please check for it.” Keep in mind it would have taken weeks for mail from Canada to get to Australia, and email was still relatively new. Seems a lifetime ago.
Mar 12/01
… I hope that the combined efforts of three generations of Croals have finally been able to sort out your phone problems. The Canadian Bell Telephone Co. told me how you were to put the call through when I applied for your card but the last time I phoned the person said she was unable to tell me how. These companies are so huge that no one knows what the other person is doing.
I find it hilarious that this saga with the phone card was evidently going on for weeks, and that my grandma refers to them by the full company name each time — now they are more simply just “Bell”. Anyone calling internationally pre-WhatsApp may remember Cici cards, where one had to dial a 16 digit number, then another 20 digit card code and passcode (or something like that) and then finally the phone number of intended recipient. Mis-press anything or forget the country code and you’d have to start over. I think the Bell card was probably something like this, but knowing Bell, probably even worse.
[Undated, mid-March]
…Grandpa was so happy to hear your voice on the phone. I was too but I have been lucky enough to talk to you twice before.
Ah ha, success at last!
March 23/01
… I hope that you can get the phone problem sorted out so that we can hear your voice. We tried to call Patrick [my brother] last weekend; every half hour for about three hours. All we got was a signal that sounded like the line was busy. It is hard to tell in the international calls just where you are in the system between Paris, Ont. and PNG.
Rats, foiled again. I guess I was able to call without the phone card. Or maybe I used a Cici card instead of the Bell one. It’s quite possible that I, on the edge of 13, didn’t call nearly as often as my grandmother would’ve liked. I am also certain that the line at my parents’ house being busy for three hours on the weekend was due to my brother playing computer games or using the dial-up internet. Or that the phone lines were out due to the rain, which happened a lot in a remote mining town that gets 11m of rain a year. (yes, that’s meters not millimeters).
Apr. 5/01
…I can’t wait for your next phone call. We will be in British Columbia from Apr. 16 — May 7.
Tons of love from a grandmother who adores you. — Mollie
Unfortunately, this letter must not have arrived in time, since the very next entry starts with the following:
May 11/01
… Sorry that we missed your phone call…
