Keeping Touch With Family Back Home Part I
By admin at 13 September, 2009, 9:24 pm
For those of you that will be leaving home for the first time one of the biggest problems you will face is homesickness. It can be fine the first week or even month but eventually that gnawing feeling in the back of your mind eventually comes to the forefront. I suppose there are many reasons for this – culture shock, missing friends and family and the general loneliness that all immigrants experience when they are by themselves in a foreign country.
Personally I feel that the key to fighting off the blues is keeping in touch with friends and family back home as often as possible. Modern technology has really made this a fairly easy thing to with minimal cost (at least compared to a decade ago) but there are still some monumental obstacles. The biggest one of course is the time difference. If you’re teaching in Asia and your friends/family are in the US or Europe the difference in time zones can be daunting. If you’re teaching during the day chances are they’re sleeping at night, and vice-versa. Of course it really depends on what sort of hours you and your friends/family work but for me the most convenient times to call home is during the early mornings or on weekends.
In the following entry I’ll discuss ways that I’ve found to keep in touch with my friends and family, as well as discuss some neat technologies I’ve found that allows you to bring a small piece of you no matter where you are.
Calling Cards
You have to be a bit careful of most calling cards. Many advertise very low rates (0.5 – 1.0 cents/min) to most western countries. However they have many hidden fees that you might not be aware of. The first one that you have to be wary of is a “call connection fee” so every time you call the calling card number you may pay a fee. So for example on a $10 card, you may end up losing a significant amount of money, especially if you make short calls. Therefore if you are going to keep in touch mainly with calling cards you are better off buying smaller denominations and testing a card out to see how much you lose in call connection fees.
The other major disadvantage of calling cards of course is the call quality. You occasionally get echoes or dropped sounds and there is often a lag that makes it difficult for you to speak over the other person. If you’ve experienced this it can make calling home a very painful experience and the amount of money you waste on trying different calling cards makes the whole experience extremely frustrating.
Skype
After several frustrating months of using various calling cards I finally decided to give Skype a try. Now there are two ways to use Skype. The first way is to use it on a PC with a headset. The second is to buy a device such as the Ipevo S0-20.
Headset
Using Skype on a headset can be a very pleasant experience, particularly if you shell out the money to get a good USB headset. These aren’t really that expensive but they save messing around with your sound card. You simply plug them directly into any USB drive and Skype recognizes them automatically. Using Skype via your PC means you can also participate in video calls, or a cool new feature that Skype recently introduced, “screen sharing”. I find this particularly useful because my parents inevitably have PC problems they want me to fix, and this allows me to look at their screen exactly so I can fix them without having to interpret what’s on the screen in front of them. It’s a small thing but it makes us both feel better and it doesn’t quite seem as if we’re that far away. The disadvantage of course is that to receive calls on Skype both parties have to have their PC on.
Wifi Phones
I’ll start off by saying that these can be quite expensive. However the call quality on these is impressive. You also forget that you are using a VOIP service as Skype calls on these devices sound excellent. They connect to Skype via your wifi network so you need to be near a wifi network or have a wifi router. Unfortunately most aren’t able to do web page authentication so if you have an open hot spot that needs you to log in via a browser you won’t be able to use these phones. However you can even potentially take them with you around your new city and connect to any free open hot spots around. May internet forums seem to think that Ipevo S0-20 is the best wifi phone around.
I’ve recently also started using Skype on my iphone, and I have to admit that the call quality is pretty good. It works as soon as you download it from the Apple “app” store. It doesn’t work over wifi (unless you jailbreak your iphone and install a program called VOIPover3G) however this may not be an issue if you plenty of wifi hotspots to choose from in your new city.
Cool Things to do with Skype
Let’s face it even though our families want to keep in touch with us they live a very busy lifestyle. It’s much easier for them to move on with their lives then it is for us. We are the ones that have made life alerting move to a foreign country and therefore we are the ones that have the desire to stay connected.
One feature I like about Skype is their unlimited plans. You can chose from a country, region or the entire world. It will give you free calls to landlines in most of these places, and in some cases (like Canada and the US) to mobiles as well. This is an excellent way of staying in touch with friends and family. Best of all there are is no credit balance to worry about since your plan comes with about 10, 000 minutes in a month. I prefer the all you can talk approach as it means I’m not going to have to worry about grabbing a phone card in the middle of the night, or worrying about any fees down the track. It helps me set my budget and lets me talk whenever and for however long I want.
Many Skype plans come with “online numbers” which give you local numbers in your home country. The main advantage of this type of Skype plan is that the party you call doesn’t need a computer, you can call them directly. If you are not at home you can also forward your “home” skype number to your new mobile. This helps to make the time difference seem like less of a hassle.
Visit Skype to take a look at their great offerings.
See part II for more great tips on staying in touch with family back home.
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