Many years ago I became a member of a Mexican family when I married Susana, one of the nine children of Francisco and Carmen Ibarra of El Platanal, Michoacán. Most of the Ibarra children grew up on the grounds of a hydroelectric plant located in a remote corner of a veritable Michoacán jungle and run by their father, an electrical engineer. The children had no other playmates but themselves and not even schoolmates, as their mother was the local “school marm” sent by the government to teach at La Planta, as the power-generating facility was called.
The result of all this was that the nine children became very close and fast friends for life.
Having reached a certain age, the children needed higher schooling and the family eventually moved to the big city, Guadalajara.
In time, two of the six sisters moved to the U.S. state of Kansas and for years kept in touch with the rest of the family through frequent and often long telephone calls. “Why don’t you use Skype for this?” I asked them a hundred times. Skype had quickly become the main way I kept in contact with my own siblings and with my wife Susy during numerous stints in far-off Saudi Arabia. “It’s completely free,” I pointed out, “as long as both sides have Skype installed in their computers, and you can both hear and see the person you’re talking to. It beats the old-fashion telephone hands down.”
But my words fell on deaf ears. They all preferred to pay Carlos Slim and his U.S. counterparts what must have added up to a staggering sum over some 35 years.
Then, only a few months ago, our nephew Ricky went off to continue his studies in France. Of course, all the other Ibarras wanted to chat with him about his life in the little town of Angoulême and that’s when they noticed the extraordinarily high amount of money Mexicans are forced to pay for transatlantic and transpacific telephone calls. Years ago, I discovered to my amazement that people here must pay twice as much to phone Japan as a Japanese person pays to call Mexico.
With Ricky insisting from Angoulême, the Ibarras of Guadalajara, Kansas and Oregon finally bought webcams (they’re very cheap) and installed Skype. To their surprise, they discovered that the installation process of this user-friendly program is “so easy even Grandpa can do it.” Well, I’ll take that back, because Don Pancho, the patriarch of the family, is now 103 years old and manages his life very well without a computer, thank you…even though he does join in the via-Skype conversations.
Every Sunday Ricky Ibarra chats with his relatives in Mexico and the USA free of charge. Not only that, he can also share his photos and even Powerpoint shows with no trouble at all, using a Skype option called “Share” which allows you to see everything on the other person’s computer desktop.
But a lot more than that is possible, as Ricky Ibarra is finding out.
“Ma, I’m hungry,” he said one Sunday, through the family laptop, “but the weather’s horrible and I don’t want to go out. What can I eat?”
“Hmm,” said Bety Ibarra. “Maybe you can make a soup. What do you have?”
“Nothing.”
“What? You don’t have a few tomatoes, onions, cubes for making chicken broth?”
“Er, well, I do have some of those things but instead of tomatoes I have a can of tomato puree.”
“Let me see it… well, that’s really a big can. OK, do you have any vegetables at all?
Ricky pointed his webcam at the stove and was soon frying onion rings in butter under his mother’s watchful eye. Not much later he was devouring a tasty cream of tomato soup with broccoli.
So successful was the Skype-assisted soup that the following Sunday Ricky had an even more unlikely request. “Ma, I’m in charge of cooking for my roommates today and I was thinking about that great onion soup you make...”
“But Ricky, the French are world-famous for their onion soup – anything but that!”
“No, no, I’m dead sure they’re going to like it. Tell me what to buy before I go shopping.”
And like it they did, calling it “Soup à l’oignon, à la Mexicain.”
If you are throwing away money to Telmex for long-distance calls, consider using Skype instead, as over 17 million people are doing right now. To download the program, go to www.skype.com, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and click on American, British or “International” English. Once you’ve got a page in English, click on “Get Skype” at the top and you are on your way. Just choose the Free Version. At some point in the installation process Skype will ask you to invent a Skype Name for yourself. Be sure you write this down, as well as the password you choose and put the info where you’ll be able to find it weeks from now when your cousin Janey says she wants to Skype you.
Once you start Skyping, you, like the Ibarras, will never want to back to the old-fashioned telephone.