Disconnected

ARI is an intentional community. One of the ways in which it fosters community is to limit outside distractions, such as TV and the Internet.

There is no TV on the campus, so you can go weeks without seeing any news or sports or commercials or reality shows. (ARI does get the Japan Times in English and the international edition of the New York Times, so we can read up on the big events.) It is interesting how little we have missed TV, but we are not big TV watchers at home.

WiFi is available only in the central classroom area (not in the dorms), and it is available only from 5AM to 10PM. The participants are encouraged not to get local SIM cards for data on their phones, but we have observed that many do anyway. We keep our phones in airplane mode, so we only have WiFi connectivity. As we spend our day out on the farm, in effect this means that we only can call our family, check email, get news, and post to Instagram around meal times. And that is when everyone else is doing the same thing, so the connection often is poor. This has been a much bigger issue for us than the lack of TV.

Keeping connected with our children has been particularly difficult because of the time difference. They are 13 or 14 hours (before or after the end of DST in the US) behind us, so as a practical matter we can only talk with them in the morning here which is the evening there. A call in the one hour during breakfast at 8:30 here is 7:30 or 6:30 the prior evening there. The best day is Sunday here, when we have a longer break after breakfast and before church.