An Internet Cafe Near Jungle Village Allows Children to Leapfrog Generations of Technology : Bringing the World to Malaysia's Rural Poor 
International Herald Tribune
August 20, 1998
Thomas Fuller

It takes a 15-minute bus ride and a walk through dense jungle to get to the library closest to this small, rubber-tapping town.

Siti Haida Abdul Aziz, 14, says she doesn't go there anymore because she has read all the good books the tiny library has to offer. Besides, the jungle walk is scary, she says.

Instead, Siti spends her free time at a recently opened Internet cafe, a 10-minute walk from her house. She surfs the Net regularly there, often visiting the NASA web site — science is her favorite subject — and chats with newfound friends in far-off places such as Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Since its inception, the Internet has been largely seen as an urban phenomenon, a resource for affluent city-dwellers or university professors.

Here in Malaysia, there are efforts to bring the Internet to the countryside. The logic: Rural people are the ones who need it most. The government is bringing the Internet into school classrooms and, more recently, setting up cyber cafes in small towns.

The plans jibe with a long-held argument in Asia that developing countries in the region are in a position to leapfrog several generations of technology.

In China, for instance, consumers can move from paying with cash to paying with credit cards — bypassing the use of checks and saving the country millions of dollars in check-clearing systems and personnel.

In Malaysia, education officials plan to install Internet links instead of more traditional audio-visual equipment such as video recorders and overhead projectors. Students will be able to listen and watch top-notch lecturers based in Kuala Lumpur over the Net.

"When we use multimedia, we are changing the learning environment — the rural area with limited resources — to one that is rich, as rich as can be found in the cities," said Mohamad Khairuddin, coordinator of what is known as the "Smart School" program at the Ministry of Education.

Here in Linggi, which is about 100 kilometers (63 miles) from Kuala Lumpur and has a population of about 2,000, the Internet cafe and the library are about the same size physically, but the cafe — which has 10 IBM-compatible computer terminals running at Pentium speed — offers infinitely more resources than the library for a fraction of the cost.

Siti says the library has mostly old story books. On the Web, she finds up-to-date information.

The NASA site, she said, "tells you about the things that exist on the planets: the types of rocks, what causes the craters, the change in temperatures and the number of years they have existed for."

Also a frequent user of the Internet cafe — which actually just has a token coffee machine in the corner — is Norbaizura Alias, a friend of Siti's who says she wants to be a lawyer.

"I watched TV and saw that people are wrongfully convicted so I want to help them," she said. Norbaizura, who is also 14, uses the Internet to chat with older Malaysian students around the country who are studying law.

The Internet allows her to meet people without traveling to see them or calling them on the telephone — both expensive options. She receives 20 ringgit ($4.73) a month as an allowance from her mother, who sells banana fritters from a small, road-side stall near the Internet cafe. She says she spends two-thirds of that paying for Internet usage.

While adults are welcome at the cyber cafes too, Norbaizura is a prime target for Malaysia's Internet plans. She is from a poor family of five children. Her clothes are old and her hair discolored, perhaps because of malnutrition. Her father died earlier this year, leaving her mother to support the family with her banana fritter business. - THERE are just a handful of shops in Linggi: a general store, coffee shop, gas station and, of course, the new Internet cafe, which opened late last year and was paid for by the country's largest political party. Inside the cafe are photos of the politician who inaugurated it — the face of Mohamed Isa, chief minister of Negri Sem Bilan, the state where Linggi is located, also appears on one terminal's screen saver — and copies of speeches in booklet form of the country's prime minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad. There are half a dozen similar Internet cafes in the area and hundreds more privately owned ones throughout Malaysia, most of them based in big towns. Linggi's Internet cafe, which charges residents three ringgit per hour to surf the Net, is managed on behalf of the political party by Zulkifly bin Mohamed Nor, a soft-spoken man who says about 200 students have come to the cafe to learn the ways of the Internet and computers since it opened. Attendance, however, may be waning. Siti says some students don't come as often now as they did a few months ago. ''We'd like to come here more but because of the economic situation we have to save money,'' she said. Indeed, Malaysia's overall plans for spreading Internet usage have been slowed by the year-old Asian economic crisis. The education ministry has scaled back the number of computers it plans to send to the 90 schools selected for its ''smart school'' program, which starts next year. Half of those schools are situated in rural areas. Moreover, parents have expressed concern to Mr. Zulkify about having Internet in their homes. ''They don't want their kids looking for pornography,'' Mr. Zulkify said.

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