When family members are apart, particularly when separated long term, there are days when a mere phone call won’t do.
For Kashmere Farmer and her husband, Atarius, newlywed airmen who have stuck together through his-and-hers deployments to Qatar, nothing seals and reseals their bond like face-to-face contact, even if it’s filtered through the screen of a computer or mobile device.
After an engagement maintained largely through video chatting, their married days are punctuated by text messages to catch up, quick phone calls to coordinate a FaceTime or Skype video-chat session, lunchtime FaceTime confabs and post-workday video chats.
Apple’s FaceTime application, which works over a Wi-Fi or mobile data connection between two of many of the brand’s devices, came pre-installed on their iPhones. Skype, which requires a software or app download and can be used from pretty much any device that carries an Internet connection and is equipped with a microphone and speakers, is installed on their computers.
The pair, she a 21-year-old public health technician and he a 23-year-old logistics officer, managed to fit in a marriage ceremony April 11 during a recent period of overlap at Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville. That lasted only a couple of weeks before he reported to his new assignment at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base.
With his job in Goldsboro, N.C., and her job at LRAFB, fitting in face-to-face chats has been “extremely necessary,” she says.
When Mary Lile Broadaway and her husband, Brad, were preparing to see their son Jack off to Fayetteville after he graduated from high school, they knew they would need some way to see his face to gauge how well he was adjusting to his new environment.
Jack, now 21, is autistic and sometimes speaks in a monotone. So before he began Project Launch, a program that teaches independent-living and job skills to college-age students with intellectual disabilities, he and his parents, both lawyers, practiced using Skype for three months at their Paragould home.
“For an autistic child, it’s difficult to get a read just by talking. You need to see how he’s doing,” Brad Broadaway, 51, says. “With Jack, it’s Mama and Daddy wanting to see. Because he’s autistic, sometimes he talks in a monotone — but facial expressions will give him away.”
Initially when they tried to practice video chatting at the house, they ran into connectivity troubles using the same Wi-Fi connection. So they installed two Wi-Fi accounts through separate service providers so they could get comfortable with the new routine.
Now they are talking by Skype “probably six times a week,” usually between 8 and 9 p.m., Broadaway says.
Though Mary Broadaway is also a state legislator who devotes a lot of her time to work in Little Rock, 2 ½ hours from Paragould, she and Brad don’t video chat routinely. But Skype, used globally by 300 million people, is working out well for them as a way to keep up with Jack.
“It sure made taking Jack up to Fayetteville much easier because we could see him as opposed to talking to him on a daily basis,” Brad Broadaway says.
He doesn’t consider himself particularly computer-savvy, but Broadaway says he doesn’t recall having any problems installing or figuring out how to use Skype, although, he says, he may have had his college-age niece on the phone while he was getting started.
His advice for those struggling with downloads and log-ins and finding contacts: “Get somebody under the age of 30 to help you set it up.”
Kashmere Farmer had noticed him first, in November 2011. Later, she spied him in a crowd of hundreds while conducting a briefing during a mock-deployment exercise, and she felt a little tongue-tied. By February, he’d sent her a message online that he had noticed her with friends they had in common; maybe they should hang out, too, he wrote.
They began dating in June 2012, and the long-distance aspect of their relationship began the following April, when he deployed to Qatar for six months. During his deployment, Skype was “definitely something that helped our relationship,” she says, “because at least he had Wi-Fi — first and foremost — and was able to contact me, and I was able to contact him whenever he had time.”
And as soon as he returned in October, she was off to the same Qatar base for nearly six months. And then, in November, he got orders stating he would eventually report to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina.
Their deployments were a challenge. She was away through three big holidays — Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s — then Valentine’s Day, and they also missed each other’s birthdays. Coordinating times to chat was a challenge when the time difference was the equivalent of an entire work shift, she says.
Having multiple forms of technology at her disposal didn’t always guarantee she’d be able to contact her loved ones.
Though the base tried to cater to all the airmen and enlisted officers by offering Internet connections to contact loved ones, she says, “if there’s one particular area where the Wi-Fi is good, people would flock.”
“Sometimes Skype would just go out, and sometimes the whole base would lose power.” Once she and her roommate in Qatar were each talking to loved ones on Skype when the power suddenly went out.
“It was really annoying at times.”
Now that the sweethearts are stateside, they alternate between Skype and FaceTime, depending on circumstances. If they both have Apple devices in hand and are on the go, FaceTime it is.
Skype, meanwhile, is designed to work on multiple platforms — including Windows, Mac and Android operating systems plus Xbox — and allows multiple users to join a call, a feature shared by Google Hangouts. Bandwidth required varies by the type of call, but users report having higher-quality connections over broadband and some quality degradation over Wi-Fi.
“I prefer FaceTime because it’s iPhone-to-iPhone. I think it works better, it doesn’t freeze up as much, and you can still hear them” if the image does freeze, she says.
For those deployed or separated, video chatting is a comforting lifeline and a way to insert some normality into strange and difficult circumstances.
“It’s definitely something that, I think personally, will make your relationship stronger,” she says. Keeping in such close contact can make them miss each other all the more, but it lets her “at least see his face every day.”
Being able to see as well as hear each other helps them keep up the in-jokes and rituals that enrich a relationship. She likes to irritate him by swiping her hand across the camera, as if she’s smacking him in the face, when he’s being “goofy.” And, though she says she knows it’s “cheesy,” they blow kisses to each other before they end a call, a substitute until they can again manage the real thing.
Now that the Farmers are married, Kashmere is putting in for a transfer to Seymour Johnson, and hopes she’ll make it there by the end of the year.
“We’re just going to have to Skype it up until we’re going to be able to see each other again.”