The Internet is transforming life in the remote regions of a country that for decades has been largely cocooned from change. (Rajiv Chandrasekaran - The Washington Post) May 13 to 19: Washington Post reporters explore how technology pervades daily life. _____Cambodia in the News_____ • The Game of Love, Cambodian Style (The Washington Post, Apr 16, 2001) • Building Barriers to Trafficking in Women (The Washington Post, Mar 16, 2001) • Key Senators Seek Changes In Anti-Drug Certification (The Washington Post, Mar 2, 2001) E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version Subscribe to The Post

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."