Letter from Japan: Time to Honor a Hero
He helps the desperately poor gain a foothold in the future -- via the Internet
By PETER McKILLOP
December 31, 1999
Web posted at 4 a.m. Hong Kong time, 3 p.m. EDT
Before the zeros begin to spin on Millennium Eve, I want to mark the transition on a hopeful note. No caustic commentary on Japan, no trumpeting the wonders of U.S.-styled capitalism. And absolutely no knock-knock jokes. In the spirit of charity and goodwill, I'd like to devote this column to my old friend and former colleague Bernie Krisher.
Bernie is a Japan institution. As Newsweek's former Tokyo bureau chief, he was the first journalist to interview Emperor Hirohito. He did so in classic Krisher fashion -- with perseverance, charm and street smarts. He stunned and scooped a foreign and Japanese press corps that had been waiting years for such an exclusive. For decades he scraped and fought his way to the top of the news heap, and in so doing made both friends and enemies throughout Asia.
Bernie eventually retired from the news business, deciding it was better to use his wonderful contacts than to be used by them. In recent years he has become a one-man United Nations. He has organized private food relief for starving North Koreans, even as governments like Japan drag their feet for inane political reasons. In Cambodia, where he is on a first-name basis with King Sihanouk, he saw hope and opportunity where most of us saw war and chaos. He started the award-winning Cambodia Daily, which now enters its sixth year of publication.
Not satisfied with all of this, he badgered his contacts across the region to establish the Sihanouk Hospital--Center of Hope. It has treated 200,000 needy Cambodians in its first three years. Krisher also founded an orphanage, and today 285 war orphans are linked via the Internet to the future. The children, says Internet guru Nicholas Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, have taken to computers and the Internet like "fish to swimming in the water." The orphanage has its own web page, at www.futurelight.org.
Says Krisher: "Some have said, 'Shouldn't food and clothing be a priority?' My reply is: 'Why not both?' I'm sure that one of our children will someday be a Bill Gates or a prime minister." Helping empower Cambodian orphans gave Bernie an even more audacious idea. To help meet the challenges of the new millennium, Bernie has set a goal of building 200 remote rural schools in Cambodia by the end of the year 2000. These won't be ordinary schools. Linked by a network of computers and servers and powered by solar panels, each school will train young Cambodians on how to use computers and how to link their villages to the Internet. Krisher hopes to promote the benefits of e-education, cybermedicine and e-commerce. An e-version of African drums, the rural web network will be used to discuss, barter and sell. Call it vcb-commerce: village to consumer to business.
The dream is well on its way to becoming reality. Last November, Krisher linked his first school to cyberspace. Now the war-ravaged village of Preah Vihear, in a poverty-stricken area nine hours by car from Phnom Penh, has access to the Internet, using a portable satellite dish and donated access to a satellite. The program's other founders include Negroponte, former Japanese Environment Minister Wakako Hironaka and the Tokyo Shintoshin Rotary Club.
So far, Krisher has received funds for 25 schools, which are due to be completed in six months. Krisher is seeking corporate and individual donors who are willing to donate $13,000 per village school; in return, a school will be named after each giver. The money will be used to build roofs over the schools for the solar panels, purchase computers and attract teachers to the villages by supplementing their modest salaries. Donors can track the progress of the schools and their project on a website, www.cambodiaschools.com.
What better way to welcome the new millennium than with evidence that this marvelous Internet technology is doing more than just making obscene amounts of money for a small techno élite. I am filled with hope that, with the vision of men like Krisher, Negroponte and Hironaka, the Internet is going where it is needed most -- to help the desperately poor gain a foothold in the future. Bill Gates, Masayoshi Son and the rest of you paper billionaires, are you listening?
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