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.
*Restricted Article* - To view rest of this content, please login or register..
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
