Airtime

We were having a family discussion on the importance of “seeing far” to reach your dreams and a girl asked something along the lines of, “What if you see far and reach far by doing something illegal? Like, steal money. Yknow, go to MTN [the cell phone provider] and manipulate the codes to steal airtime?” I wanted to give the girl a great big hug because rather than say “rob a bank” which is close to irrelevant here, where banks are few and far apart, the first example she could come up with was “robbing cell phone airtime.” Cell phone air time is a major means, in parts of the developing world with few banks, of storing, saving and transferring money. It is also how I pay for internet in Kigali.

One of the girls was looking at my phone, and checked what my airtime was. It was at 5,000 francs, as I had just added air time. That’s less than $10. “5,000 francs?” the girls exclaimed, all peering over my phone. “You are rich!” Outside of the wealthy center of Kigali, most people don’t add more than a few hundred francs at a time. Around Rubona, the only option I have found so far is to add 300 francs (50 cents or around 2 NIS) at a time – people just don’t have more than 300 francs to add to their cell phones.

In Kigali, there are MTN airtime sellers on the street – sellers who run around trying to get you to buy airtime. Recently, they started trying to sell me 10,000 (less than $20) worth of airtime – as far as I know, 5,000 francs was the most I could get before. The card looks absurd – 10,000 francs? That’s a crazy amount of airtime to add all at once in one place, I think to myself. And it’s funny, because for me it’s not too much. There are many days that I have 10,000 francs in my wallet, which is a lot to carry around outside of Kigali, and most places inside Kigali. But to have 10,000 francs of airtime in my phone? That just seems like a socially exorbitant amount of money to appear on my Rwandatel cell phone screen.

Because airtime is pricey, it is very popular here (and, as far as I know, most of Africa) for people to call and hang up, expecting you to call back. In Rwanda, people I have met in the rural areas call me 10 to 20 times, as if the only reason I am not calling them back is because I have not yet realized they want to reach me.

Kids having cell phones has not yet caught on here. They carry radios, which are not much more than the cheapest of cheap cell phones, so I don’t think it’s only an issue of expenses, though that is surely a factor. Even the wealthier kids in Kigali do not have cell phones. Just a matter of time, I suppose.