South China Morning Post, Feb. 19, 2001
INTERNET'S ARRIVAL BRINGS HOPS TO ISOLATED VILLAGER
Eric Unmacht in Robib, Preah Vihear province
With his eyes glued to a digital screen and
his hand rapidly clicking a mouse, Sam Savadar has joined a global
network of children growing up in the world of the Internet.
His shared experience with children in San Francisco, London and
Hong Kong starts and finishes, however, with a satellite dish enclosed
outside his classroom in a pigpen-like structure, which prevents the
cows and other animals roaming the schoolyard from destroying
it.
"I used to imagine that children in places like the United
States have a lot of modern equipment and life is very different
there," said Sam, 12.
"I think now that we have the Internet, we will have a lot of
progress."
With the arrival of the satellite dish, computers and a series of
projects aimed at teaching the villagers how to apply the technology
have come new hopes for the villagers of Robib. But the debate about
the Internet's practical implications for those outside the developed
world has a history as long as the technology itself.
"Everyone talks about the digital divide, but we haven't seen
anything practical," said Bernard Krisher, an American
philanthropist who spearheaded the project. "We don't know what
this can and cannot do. Some say it's not the way to address the
health problem. I think it is.
" The Internet experiment in the remote north of Cambodia,
organised and funded by non-profit organisations, aid agencies and
individual donors, intends to explore the limits of Internet
practicality in a place isolated from the larger world by decades of
civil war. Some hope the experiment will demonstrate how villagers
around the world can use the Internet to leapfrog into the developed
world, but others fail to see its value beyond exporting information
from that world to an area ill-prepared to make use of it.
While children in the village, which has a population of just under
5,000, have been learning how to use computers and the Internet in the
classroom, two non-profit organisations, American Assistance for
Cambodia and Japan Relief for Cambodia, are helping some of the women
to use the Internet to sell their silkwares. The silk-weaving trade in
the village was lost during the Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s,
and villagers say it has only been made profitable again by the
Internet, which allows them to take advantage of international
markets.
The most recently launched project allows villagers to receive
medical assistance at the local clinic as part of a new telemedicine
experiment, which links the local patients, who earn an average of
US$37 (HK$287) a year, to doctors both in the capital and at medical
facilities in the United States.
Even after the last of the Khmer Rouge leaders surrendered to the
Government three years ago, most of the villagers were left with only
ox carts to get to the nearest doctor or hospital, a journey that
could take up to 1.5 days.
Now villagers with no piped water, electricity or telephone systems
have access to solar panels, computers, the Internet and access to
some of the best medical advice in the world.
A nurse, who plans to visit once a month from the capital, conducts
basic patient check-ups, records the information and takes digital
photographs of the symptoms. The information is then sent via the
satellite Internet connection and the nurse awaits a diagnosis and
recommendations. The local nurses may be able to treat minor ailments
or bring the remedy on the next monthly trip, but without almost any
equipment and a solar-powered refrigerator for medicine, but no
medicine, the clinic is unprepared to address serious ailments.
"They know the patients are very sick and what's the next
thing?" said Henk Bekedam, chief technical adviser at the
Ministry of Health. "At the end of the day, you need to look at
the whole system, prevention, diagnosis and treatment. If you don't
have all the steps, it won't help very much in improving people's
health."
Sceptics of using the Internet as a means to delivering valuable
medical assistance to villages such as Robib say the resources spent
on obtaining the long-range, hi-tech diagnosis, such as the US$18,000
a year it costs to maintain the satellite, may be better spent on
equipment for the clinic, medicine, or paying for one of the doctors
in the capital, where some claim an over-abundance of doctors live, to
travel or live in the village.
"People love big machines," Mr Bekedam said. "It's
possible this could lead to better diagnosis, but there's still so
much a doctor learns about his patients by just talking and watching
them." Those who support the idea of telemedicine still argue
there is inherent value in making people aware of health issues, even
if no immediate solution exists.