Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Feb. 18, 2001
FEATURE: CAMBODIAN VILLAGE HOOKS UP TO THE WORLD VIA
THE INTERNET
By Eric Unmacht, dpa
Preah Vihear, Cambodia (dpa) - With his eyes glued to a digital
screen and his hand rapidly clicking a mouse, Cambodian schoolboy
Sam Savadar has joined a global network of fifth-grade children who
are 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 from roaming in his schoolyard.
``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 Savadar, 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 residents of Robib
village in the northwestern province of Preah Vihear.
``I have seen people use the Internet to see the news on English
websites,'' Sam Savadar said. ``But I cannot understand it because I
don't speak English.''
This Internet experiment in the remote jungle terrain of
Cambodia, organized and funded by non-profit organizations, aid
agencies and individual donors, is aimed at exploring the limits of
internet practicality.
Some hope the experiment in an area that has remained isolated from
the larger world as a result of decades of civil war will
demonstrate how villagers around the world can use the Internet to
leapfrog into the developed world.
But others deny its value beyond exporting information from that
world to an area ill-prepared to make use of it.
Two non-profit organizations, American Assistance for Cambodia and
Japan Relief for Cambodia, have been teaching the children in the
4,000-person village how to use computers and the Internet.
The organizations are also using the Internet to help the women
revive a once-thriving silk-weaving trade, lost during the Khmer
Rouge regime of the late 1970s and made profitable again by access
to international markets via the Worldwide Web.
The most recently launched project allows villagers to receive
international medical assistance at the local clinic as part of a
new telemedicine experiment.
The local patients, who earn an average of 37 dollars per year, are
connected to physicians both in the capital and at prestigous
medical facilities in the United States by their local Internet
connection.
``Telemedicine originated with NASA wanting to see how their
astronauts were doing,'' said Michael Hawley, media technology
professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the
project consultants.
``We're using basically the same system here that we used to at a
base camp at the bottom of Mount Everest,'' he said. ``That linked
the climbers to the Yale medical school and Princeton.''
Up until a few years ago, fighting between government forces and the
Khmer Rouge soldiers, who found sanctuary along the Thai border,
often made the roads leading into Robib too dangerous to
navigate.
Many of the villagers still use oxcarts to get to the nearest doctor
or hospital, a journey that could take up to a day and a half.
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 same-day diagnosis and recommendations.
The local nurses may be able to treat minor ailments, or bring
simple remedies on the next monthly trip, but with little 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 advisor at the Ministry of
Health. ``At the end of the day, you need to look at whole system,
prevention, diagnosis and treatment.''
``If you don't have all the steps,'' he said. ``It won't help very
much in improving people's health.''
Sceptics of using the Internet to deliver valuable medical
assistance to such villages as Robib say the resources spent
on obtaining the long-range, high-tech diagnosis may be better
spent.
They point out that the 18,000 dollars per year it costs to maintain
the satellite connection could be used for equipment, medicine, or
paying for one of the doctors in the capital, which some argue
houses an over-abundance of doctors, to travel or live in the
village.
``People love big machines,'' 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.''
``It could also create all kinds of anxieties and hopes and some
might just be false,'' he said. ``It's helpful to share knowledge,
but only helpful when you can take the next step.''