Sylvia's Journal

Computer viruses are more rampant in West Africa than anywhere else. I don’t know why but my computer constantly gets infected by the pen drives (data sticks) that people use to exchange files. May be it is because many people travel with pen drives or external hard disks and use them in internet cafes. It is the computer equivalent of having sex with strangers in bath houses. So when someone gives me a pen drive in this part of the world I am particularly careful. Yet somehow one virus slipped into the system. Symantec discovered it but told me there was nothing it could do. I had just finished reading Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone about the Ebola and Marburg virus and it felt a little bit like catching one of those. With some sense of dread and foreboding I was waiting to see if this infection was going to be fatal.

And then it happened, the sluggishness, a reboot and then all my personal settings disappeared. Everything familiar on my desktop had vanished. Instead I saw the solemn grey Dell screen that is standard in the new computer. While all this was happening the one facilitator who I had not seen in action yet was doing his session. I needed to watch him. I tried not to panic.

What happened next was quite similar to my reaction 6 months ago in the other crash. The feelings generated by both crashes were remarkably similar. There was a moment of bewilderment, followed by surrender – a recognition that this was an event entirely beyond my control. And then there was an intense effort to concentrate on the here and now and trying not to think of what lay ahead; while life went on in the background. Only for me had the foreground and background traded places.

I alerted Cabul to my predicament and he started to Skype chat with colleagues in Boston for help. He was my first responder and was able to stop the wave of panic by finding everything else that was not on the desktop. That was one big sigh of relief, something similar to when the doctors said, “You will all be OK.”

And then came the period in which everything that was simple before and that you took for granted no longer was. Like the names of people you email regularly that automatically complete themselves when you start typing; or the way the desktop was organized; or Outlook that needed to be installed and was empty at first, taking hours to fill up with megabytes of content, or all the electronic Post-It Notes that I had on my desktop with things I wanted to remember or be reminded of, such as codes, numbers, quotes, book titles, websites, etc.

Several hours passed and I started the long work of computer rehab to re-build everything that had to do with personal settings until I had no more energy left. Back in my room I restarted my computer again for reasons I can’t remember anymore. Then there was that moment of suspense, staring for what seemed like eons to the empty blue blank screen, and then suddenly, there was the old desktop again with everything on it, as if nothing happened, even the files I had been moving from one place to another were where they are supposed to be. As if it was all just a bad dream.