Solar-powered schools bring computer age to rural Cambodia
By CHRIS FONTAINE= Associated Press Writer
ROBAP, Cambodia (AP) _ Bun Ron is 13 years old and has never seen a computer in his life. Plopped in front of a new Macintosh, he struggles to comprehend how the strange machine can do the amazing things that foreigners say it can, like grow better crops or help heal the sick. ``I don't know,'' is all the confused child can muster when confronted by a horde of journalists flown by helicopter to this desperately poor corner of Cambodia to witness the genesis of an ambitious experiment by American philanthropist Bernard Krisher. Bun Ron and 300 other children in Robap village will soon attend a solar-powered schoolhouse equipped with computers that can be linked to the Internet via satellite. Krisher, a retired journalist, envisions these children accelerating past age-old hardships like growing enough rice to eat and moving on to more modern dilemmas. such as hard-drive crashes and e-mail spam. ``People say we're crazy to do this; that these children need clothes, they need food, not computers. I think they can have both,'' he says.
Krisher hopes the village will learn to use the Internet to cure disease by linking up to faraway hospitals and relief agencies. The schools could also obtain the latest crop growing techniques, he says, or construct a webpage to advertise village handicrafts to a worldwide market. But the education gap is obviously daunting for the children at Thursday's opening of the first of a planned 200 such schools. They have no English skills _ the language of the Internet _ and they have never used a typewriter, not to mention a keyboard or a mouse. ``I have no idea what this is,'' 14-year-old Mom Theary says of her school's new computer. ``I have never seen one before, but I want to learn.''
Getting qualified Cambodian teachers to work in remote villages is a major stumbling block, but Krisher hopes cash incentives provided by a World Bank loan and personal encouragement from King Norodom Sihanouk will convince computer-savvy educators to embark on a ``Peace Corps-like'' adventure. Maintaining the high-tech equipment 300 kilometers (187 miles) from the nearest computer shop is another issue, exemplified by the fact that trained technicians had trouble setting up a demonstration for the $ 3,000 dish that links a modem to a communications satellite.
An official from the Telecommunications Ministry later worried that the independent transmitter/receiver may be illegal in Cambodia. Donors shelling out $13,000 to get a school built _ and see their names on it _ did not appear concerned, convinced that bugs will eventually be worked out and that children never disappoint in their capacity to quickly pick up new concepts. ``These children are like fish. If you throw them into the water, they will swim,'' says donor Nicholas Negroponte, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ``They will have a quantum jump,'' says Japanese legislator Wakako Hironaka, whose name will grace the Robap school. ``It will be a different kind of learning process. They will be able to connect with the world.'' |
