Hi Frank - this is the type of article that I'd usually post on my own satellite thread, but I thought you'd get as much of a kick out of it as I do. Helps to keep it all in perspective - the Internet is really about making the world a better place to live for all of us.
>>Cambodian Village Wired to Future Satellite Internet Link Transforming Economy and Culture
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 13, 2001; Page A01
ROVIENG, Cambodia -- For as
long as anyone here can remember,
this dusty farming village deep in
Cambodia's northern hinterland had
been cocooned from even the
weakest winds of development by
a line of imposing mountains, miles
of nearly impregnable jungle and
the brutal Khmer Rouge regime,
whose guerrillas kept outsiders
away by sprinkling land mines in the
countryside and ambushing traffic
on the only road into town.
Like countless other Cambodian villages, there is no telephone or electricity
service here. Paved roads and mail deliveries are similarly alien concepts.
Cans of Coke, packs of Marlboros and other ubiquitous global brands are
nowhere to be found. Most people in this hamlet of 128 families eke out a
living as subsistence farmers, making less than $40 a year.
But lately, the villagers have been doing some unusual things. Grade-schoolers
ogle pictures of Thai movie stars -- even though they have never seen a
movie. They make friends with children in other cities without leaving town.
Women weave silk scarves that are sold in far-off countries. Men now make
a year's wage in a month working on a new pig farm.
Residents know the changes are the result of a few never-before-seen
contraptions at the village schoolhouse -- a couple of desktop computers, a
set of solar panels and a satellite dish -- that have connected the village to
something called the Internet.
"I don't really know what the Internet is or how it works," said Mit Mien, the
village chief. "But it is changing our lives."
Funded by an American aid organization, Rovieng's on-ramp to the
information superhighway is one of several electronic construction projects
around the world that aim to bridge the "digital divide" -- the ever-growing
discrepancy in access to information technology between rich and poor
nations. Backers of such endeavors say the Internet, which has revolutionized
commerce and communication in the industrialized world, also has the power
to change traditional patterns of development in the Third World, giving
isolated people access to markets and information that could leapfrog them
out of poverty.
"What we are trying to demonstrate is that two computers, powered by solar
panels and hooked up to the Internet, can change a village," said Bernard
Krisher, who heads a nonprofit group called American Assistance for
Cambodia that is paying for the project. "It can have a real impact on people's
lives."
In Rovieng, the Internet connection is radically transforming the economy and
the educational system, but because very few of the villagers understand
English -- the lingua franca of the online world -- facilitating those changes is
requiring extensive training and support from project organizers, suggesting
that it will take more than just cheap computers and satellite dishes to connect
other remote communities.
In the long yellow schoolhouse, with its concrete floors and splintering
wooden desks, pupils now take a three-month course aimed at teaching them
the basics of how to send electronic mail and browse Web sites. They know
how to cruise to a Web site in Germany to view pictures of Angkor Wat, the
ancient collection of temples in their country that they cannot afford to visit in
person. Some of them even have e-mail pen pals at an orphanage Krisher
funds in the capital, Phnom Penh, which is a seven-hour, bone-jarring drive to
the south.
The impact on Rovieng's economy is even more significant. Several young
women have revived the village's traditional silk weaving industry, which died
out during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in the 1970s. The regime killed
an estimated 1.7 million people as it tried to transform the country into an
agrarian utopia with no families, schools, culture or religion.
The scarves are sold through the village's Web site (www.villageleap.com)
to customers around the world, but the profits from the new-economy
experiment are being plowed into the creation of something decidedly more
old-fashioned: a pig farm. The farm has generated new employment, possible
spinoff industries and hoped-for profits that will go into a fund to pay for the
villagers' medical care.
"This is the best job in the village," said Chan Hat, 43, a rice farmer who now
cares for 10 squealing piglets. "It's much better than working in the field."
Chan earns about $30 a month at the farm, which is what he made in a whole
year from selling the rice his family did not eat. He said he is hoping to use his
newfound wealth to buy a luxury item for the first time in his life.
"I want a TV," he said with a sparkle in his eye. "Maybe one day, if I keep
working here, I will be able to afford one."
Chan, who has eight children ranging in age from 1 to 21, insisted that he does
not intend to squander his money, promising instead to save some for his
family. His steady job also means that his children now will be able to
continue in school instead of being forced to work in the rice fields.
"I am sure they will have a better life than I had," said Chan. "We are a very
lucky village."
Residents here expressed surprisingly few reservations about the Internet's
power to expose people to alien cultural influences, or to change basic social
structures by making young female weavers some of the richest residents and
giving children skills that their parents do not possess. They also do not seem
to mind Krisher's decision to refer to the village as Robib, which he has done,
he said, because "it is easier for Americans to pronounce." But development
experts say that as villagers spend more time online, and as Internet-related
social transformations become clearer to people, tensions likely will emerge.
Just a few miles away, up a rutted dirt path, residents of neighboring villages
have never heard of the Internet. They do know, however, of the prosperity
that is slowly bubbling forth in Rovieng, and they too would like the same
opportunity.
But whether it makes sense for governments, international lending institutions
and aid organizations to spend their limited development budgets on
technological whizbangery is still the subject of intense debate. A number of
development specialists and even some technology executives, including
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, have questioned the wisdom of wiring
the Third World at the expense of immunizing, educating and helping to feed
the 1.2 billion people around the world who make less than $365 a year.
"Does anybody have any idea what it's like to live on one dollar a day?" Gates
asked pointedly at a digital-divide conference last year. "There are things
people need at that level other than technology."
But other development experts as well as a chorus of political leaders argue
that devoting more money to setting up Internet connections in poor villages
will, in the long run, provide people with a degree of self-sufficiency. Wired
villagers could, they maintain, go online to find the actual market prices of
goods to better haggle with middlemen or communicate with physicians in
far-off cities instead of relying on poorly trained local doctors.
"The idea is to be able to give the people the information and the means they
need to grow out of poverty themselves," said Vinod Thomas, a World Bank
vice president.
Proponents also expect a big part of the cost of increasing Third World
Internet penetration to be borne by private foundations and businesses,
particularly those in the technology industry. Hewlett-Packard Co. recently
announced a program to donate computers to such projects, and AOL Time
Warner Inc. has pledged to provide Internet access to Peace Corps
volunteers to hook up the villages in which they serve.
Although more than one-third of people have access to the Internet in the
world's richest nations, less than one in 1,000 do in poor countries, such as
Cambodia. Residents of developed nations account for more than 85 percent
of Internet users, according to the United Nations.
The U.N. Economic and Social Council has set an ambitious goal of placing
an Internet-connected computer within a one-mile radius of most of the
world's villages. The organization is hoping to raise more than $1 billion from
the private sector and developed nations over the next few years to fund the
project -- money it hopes will not come at the expense of other development
efforts.
"We are trying to strike a balance," said Mark Malloch Brown, the director of
the U.N. Development Program. "Information technology has enormous
power to change development, but it's not a short-term thing that should take
the place of everything else we are doing. A computer still cannot fill a
stomach, produce clean water or pay for vaccinations."
Efforts to wire the world have been energized by the production of
increasingly cheap computers, solar panels and satellite dishes. And efforts
are underway to develop new types of technology that may be better suited to
remote communities and Internet neophytes. Scientists in India, for instance,
are testing a $200 hand-held computer with wireless Internet access and a
picture-based operating system that even illiterate farmers can use.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have constructed
mobile Internet community centers inside metal shipping containers that have
been transported to several villages in Costa Rica and the Dominican
Republic.
"New technology can go a long way toward helping to solve this problem,"
said Michael Hawley, a professor at MIT's Media Lab who studies
digital-divide issues.
Although the price of computing hardware has fallen, the cost of satellite
connections -- the only way people in places such as Rovieng can tap into the
Internet -- remains prohibitively expensive. Krisher was able to get around the
obstacle by encouraging a satellite company in Thailand, owned by Prime
Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, to donate a 64,000-bit-per-second link to the
village, which is valued at about $18,000 a year.
"If we had to pay for satellite time, there's no way we could afford to do this,"
Krisher said.
Krisher, a former Newsweek reporter who lives in Tokyo, contends that
projects like his could be feasible over a broad area if telecommunications
companies gave away unused satellite capacity to the Third World. "They
have a social responsibility to do this," he said. "It's like drug companies
offering low-cost AIDS medicines or the Metropolitan Opera filling its empty
seats with students who pay a few dollars. These companies should donate
30 percent of their airtime, which probably isn't even being used today, to the
developing world. It wouldn't cost them anything."
Getting more donations is not the only obstacle. The Cambodian government
took nine months to grant Krisher a waiver to bypass the state-run
telecommunications monopoly, and officials have not been encouraging about
handing out others.
Even with the satellite link in place, keeping the system running -- and getting
villagers to make the most of it -- has been a challenging and labor-intensive
process.
Krisher has had to hire two full-time computer teachers and another staff
member to maintain the satellite link, the solar panels and the computers. And
then there is the water buffalo problem: Grazing cattle have knocked over the
satellite dish, forcing the construction of a bamboo fence around it.
Because none of the villagers had any experience with computers, Krisher's
staff also had to set up and operate the Web site through which the scarves
are sold. They also take care of shipping and credit-card processing. "We're
not yet at the point of self-sufficiency," he said.
The village's "tele-medicine" program suffers from the same problem.
Although a team of doctors in Boston has agreed to help diagnose villagers'
ailments once a month, a technician must be sent from Phnom Penh to take
digital pictures and input symptoms in the computer.
The language barrier also is affecting how the computers are used. Almost
nobody in the village speaks or reads English, and there is very little on the
Internet that is written in Khmer, the language everyone here uses. As a
consequence, most adults have been staying away from the schoolhouse,
where anyone is allowed to use the computers in the afternoon.
"I've heard that you can search for things and communicate" with the Internet,
said Tien Hoa, 35, a shopkeeper. "But I don't know English, so what good
would it be for me?"
Most children, however, do not appear to have such reservations. Although
they often click through the Web sites aimlessly, they continue to be
mesmerized by the machines. "It's the most fun thing to do in the village,"
gushed Ke Sotheary, 13, as she scrolled through pictures of cats to attach to
an electronic greeting card.
Even if the children spend most of their online time fooling around, Krisher
argues, the experience is making them more familiar with computers and the
mechanics of the Internet. Eventually, he said, he wants to have some of the
students travel to other villages to work as computer teachers. Others, he
muses, could one day be employed in Rovieng as data entry clerks who
electronically transcribe paper documents for foreign businesses.
"We may not know too much about the Internet, but we are very happy to
have it," said Pon Lay Heng, 19, who now cheerfully weaves bright orange
scarves instead of toiling in her family's rice fields. "It has given us a future."
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