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The Editor
Managing Editor
Cambodian Online
Information
24-Aug-2005
Last Edited
Alecks P Pabico
BANLUNG, Cambodia, Sep 15 (IPS) - Situated on Cambodia's border with Laos and Vietnam in the north-east, Ratanakiri province is a largely unspoiled Eden of densely forest-covered hills and mountains, pristine rivers, streams, thousand-year old crater lakes and waterfalls.
Electricity service extends only up to nine kilometres from Banlung, the provincial centre. Less than two percent of the predominantly tribal population a country of 13.36 million people have access to telephone lines.
The remoteness of Ratanakiri gets even more pronounced at the onset of the rainy season when the sun remains mostly hidden behind thick, dark storm clouds and heavy downpours drench the land for days on end, rendering rugged highways of rich red earth impassable.
But all these do not faze Dara Chanly. Five days a week, she traverses more than 10 kilometres of Ratanakiri's muddy, potholed roads aboard the local 'motodup' (motorcycle taxi) from Banlung to get to the Gloria Jarecki School in Koun Mon district. There, she teaches English and computer classes to indigenous schoolchildren.
Dara Chanly's students all belong to the nearby village populated by the Kreung tribe, one of eight ethnic groups -- collectively called 'Khmer Loeu' -- that comprise majority of the people that for hundreds of years have called these Cambodian highlands home.
The Cambodian government coined the word Khmer Loeu -- literally "Highland Khmer" -- in the 1960s in order to create a feeling of unity between the highland tribal groups and the ruling lowland ethnic Khmer. Reliable population figures are unavailable but the total Khmer Loeu is estimated at nearly 100,000 persons.
"My students come regularly to school," Dara Chanly gladly claims. "They try hard to study. They like to learn English and are very interested to learn about computers."
In August, the 24-year-old teacher started introducing them to basic computer programmes like Microsoft Word and Paintbrush. In the next three months, those who fare better in class will begin learning about the Internet and electronic mail.
Further westward some 30 kilometres from town, Nop Vey, 35, has also been teaching the same subjects to Khmer students in grade levels 2 to 4 at the Sapporo Acasia Lion's Club School.
In between classes, Nop Vey acts as the village postman, sending complaints or requests for assistance from residents via e-mail to the provincial governor's office. This May, he assisted the village chief with the community's request for the repair of the school pump well -- by taking a digital image of the handwritten letter and sending it as an e-mail attachment. "Now the villagers are able to use the pump again," says Nop Vey.
Seemingly an aberration in this primordial paradise, the schools where Dara Chanly and Nop Vey teach are among the 15 rural schools in Ratanakiri built from American Assistance for Cambodia/Japan Relief for Cambodia (AAfC/JRfC) funds, and from donations from individuals abroad.
Equipped with solar panels to provide up to eight hours of electricity a day, the schools are linked to the Internet by an ingenious system called Daknet -- inspired by the Hindi word for mail -- but which is more commonly referred here as the Internet Village Motoman project.
Introduced in September 2003, the technology provides wireless Internet access to the village schools. It was developed by a dotcom start-up in Boston called First Mile Solutions, formed by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Early successful applications of Daknet in rural India made use of a government bus outfitted with mobile access points -- in Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) fashion -- that goes around the villages to wirelessly collect and deliver data to and from the satellite hub and the computers on the network.
But in Ratanakiri, motorcycles had to take the place of buses owing to the undulating terrain and bad road conditions.
Every morning, 'motomen' aboard donated motorcycles with Wi-Fi-equipped boxes ply five different routes around the province, starting from the central hub located at the Ezra Vogel School behind the provincial hospital in Banlung to collect e-mail from the satellite dish.
Passing by one village school to the next, the e-mailmen transmit the downloaded messages and retrieve outgoing mail. At the end of the day, they return to Banlung to hand over collected e-mails and web search queries for the satellite hub to relay to the Internet.
Encouraged by the initial success, plans are afoot to deploy the Internet Village Motoman Project to AAfC/JRfC's network of 250 schools all over Cambodia, including places like Pailin in western Cambodia, a former stronghold of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
"Our focus is really on remote, isolated areas largely underserved by government," says Nuon So Thero, AAfC/JRfC country director. In a country heavily dependent on foreign aid, the Internet Village Motoman Project is helping address the digital divide in Cambodia's emerging information society.
Creative efforts elsewhere are also using information and communication technologies (ICTs) are giving Cambodians access to news and information to an extent unparalleled in their country's tumultuous, strife-ridden history.
For instance, community information centres (CICs) have been set up in all 22 provinces or municipalities in Cambodia -- funded by the Asia Foundation in partnership with local non- governmental organisations and with funding from the United States Agency for International Development.
Located in provincial capitals, the CICs are providing residents outside Phnom Penh an alternative source of information -- for free -- in areas where the traditional media, like newspapers, have very limited or no presence at all.
Typically, depending on the population density of the province, the centres will have from four to 10 computers, all with Internet connectivity either via a satellite uplink or dial-up lines.
The centres, which also provide library services, cater to students, teachers, government people, NGO workers, business people, monks and even farmers. The smaller centres, like the one in Ratanakiri, average 25 visitors a day while the bigger ones attract 100 to 150 daily.
CIC staff pay routine visits to the remote areas, bringing with them printed news, information and other downloaded materials that may be of use to them.
In Kandal, rice millers who cannot go to the CIC get market information and other data from the visiting staff of SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) Cambodia, which operates the centre there.
"One time, we gave them information retrieved from the Internet about the existing alternative technologies like biomass and biogas which they can use to produce electricity for their mills," says Un Roeurn, SME Cambodia provincial manager. "(They) are certainly helping to inform people,'' Pauline Tweedie, ICT programme officer of the Asia Foundation, says of the impact of new technologies on Cambodian society. "There are tens of thousands of people who now know about the Internet, who know how to access it and find information when they have questions."
"I think that has a tremendous power to make them a little bit active, and to get better in asking questions," adds Tweedie. "That's helping empower people."
The CIC project also has a Khmer-language web portal called www.cambodiacic.org with news and development-oriented information like flood levels on the Mekong River, human rights contacts, profile and contact details of national and local government officials, prices of goods and services, job listings, tourism data, and a lot more.
The setting up of the CICs has also led to the publication of local independent newspapers under the auspices of the Asia Foundation, in the provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap, Kampong Cham and Sihanoukville.
Bearing the name 'Somne Thmey', (New Writing), the newspapers are published twice a week and sold for only 1,000 riels (25 U.S. cents).
At the same time, Tweedie concedes that the CICs' location in provincial capitals leaves out many people in rural areas.
"But the reason why the CICs are located in the provincial centres is that we didn't feel it's necessarily the correct time within present developments to introduce something like computers, especially when people are still dealing with conditions in which their basic needs are not being met," she says.
"Besides, technology is going to come along in a time that's right," she insists. "We can help people to understand that trying to push technology forward before the community is ready for it is not necessarily going to help them jump ahead or leapfrog into the information society. Just providing computers will not revolutionise the community."
(*This report is made possible by a reporting fellowship grant from the South-east Asian Press Alliance.)
(END/2004)
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