The Problem
Problem: you have someone’s grandbaby, niece, nephew and/or great-grandbaby, and you live on the other side of the globe. Aside from mom and dad, all the people who love him or her the most are far, far away. This really, really sucks!
We were in Canada for the first four months of Lilia’s life (she spent her first month outside her mommy in the NICU). During that time our Facebook accounts were filled with baby photos and videos as well as daily comments from family and friends all around the globe. And that was when we were still living with family in our own country; we hadn’t even left yet.
In China, Facebook is was the ultimate tool for sharing baby photos and videos with far away family members (and, thanks to the privacy options, not the entire sleaze-saturated, creep-infested, pervert-enabling internet). Everyone from my grandparents to their great-grandkids are on Facebook, and it just kills to not get to share our daughter with them. We also miss the weekly and often daily FB interaction revolving around our nieces and nephews and whatever other family adventures are going on (most recently: the 2010 Olympic Games in our hometown!). Obviously it’s not as good as being within driving distance of your relatives, but FB was a big help and it’s sorely missed.
Some Options
So, 怎么办？ Here’s the three options we’ve come across for making the physical distance from family members a little less painful. If you have other ideas, please let us know in the comments!
1) Get a VPN
We haven’t bothered to used a paid service to unrestrict our internet in China. When it comes to the internet less can be more, I’m really cheap, and I assume those VPN services will be blocked eventually anyway. But for $60 bucks a year (wow, I really am cheap…) you can get great services like the one we just won for free! The good folks at ChengduLiving.com had a free giveaway and just yesterday we won six months of free VPN service! We tried it this morning and it’s working great; click here to see the details — you can get a discount code from ChengduLiving.com. (Thanks tons, guys!) Our original strategy didn’t involve VPNs, so I don’t know if we’ll keep using it or not once our free six months are up.
2) Get/Make a Facebook substitute
I’m really cheap, Facebook was already sucking up too much of my time, and I wanted a baby-photo-sharing backup that would work even if/when China blocked every proxy and VPN in the world. So we set up a private, password-protected, family-only WordPress blog. Since we already pay for our own domain name and hosting, this didn’t cost us anything extra. It’s not as slick as Facebook, of course, but we can still share photo galleries and upload video clips that our family can download, and everyone can leave comments and share their own stories and photos. It’s also nice to have some family-members-only space on the internet. Our families can see photos and video the same day we take them.
There’s no guarantee that our domain name/hosting server won’t go the way of Facebook, YouTube, and a growing list of proxies and VPNs; personal sites get blocked, too. But we try to play nice by staying away from topics and words that the gov. deems sensitive. Plus sites like ours aren’t as high priority for censors or as high profile as proxies anyway.
3) Use Skype
You don’t need a top-of-the-line computer or video camera (we have older stuff) to pull off great Skype video calls. And it’s free! And if your grandparents are too computer-illiterate to handle Skype, you can just Skype their phones for pennies a minute at the most ($0.02/minute to Canada and the USA). When international video calls or phone calls are this easy, it’d be tragic not to take advantage of the opportunity.
Any other ideas? How do you stay connected with family and friends back home?
Related:
Other foreign baby in China essentials:
- Foreign baby in China essentials: IMPORTED BABY FORMULA
- Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
- Foreign baby in China essentials: AIR PURIFIER
Canada:
China:
Taiwan:
The States:
Brazil:
UK:
Hey, congrats on winning Freedur! I did too. Just in time – I’m having a similar family/baby missing issue. We went back to the states for Spring Festival, and since my sister-in-law was due Feb. 17th we thought it would work out perfectly to be there for the birth of my nephew as well. Unfortunately he wasn’t born until March 1, the day we had to report back to work here in China. I’m missing them a lot right now.
Thanks for sharing how you keep in touch, we do those things too. Not the same as in person though.
You don’t want to fork out 35RMB/mo for a VPN! Man, you ARE cheap! :)
I like your private domain idea, and I would bet that as long as you restrict the search bots from crawling the site then you should have no GFW problems.
Ha, I know! I never really thought much about what it would cost because I figured, well, we have Plan B ready to go and it surely won’t hurt me to have less time online.
Hey, since when did you get unblocked? I just pulled up your site without the VPN (which is on my wife’s computer).
I had no idea I was unblocked…sure would make me happy though!
I got it at home and at work where we’re double filtered, so maybe they’ve let you out of internet purgatory. Though in both places it comes through a little spotty, like not everything totally loads properly, but most of it is there.
hey people here, i have a free vpn set up by a friend of a friend. anyone interested can email me. hans.stam@gmail.com
hey people here, don’t forget you give your e-mail and get free software over the internet from friends of friends of random strangers at your own risk. ;)
[...] Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE [...]
[...] Foreign baby in China essentials: FACEBOOK SUBSTITUTE (or VPN) & SKYPE [...]