CORNELL GIVES EL LIMON AID

It was a big deal when the tiny grocery store in the remote Dominican village of El Limon was given a truck. That meant the store could finally buy eggs in the valley below to sell to villagers. Eggs were once a rare commodity — the storeowner had to drive an old motorbike on dirt roads to purchase goods. When it rains, the roads turn to impassable pools of mud.

Yet within this rural environment, in an unused classroom in the village school, sit computers with Internet access on which El Limon's 350 citizens have been able to surf the Web for more than three years now.

“We're making a model for rural development,” said Jon Katz, the Cornell University researcher responsible for bringing the Web to El Limon.

Katz's original mission in El Limon didn't even involve the Internet — he was commissioned to develop a hydroelectric system. But he had seen through past experiences in introducing West African children to e-mail that the Internet had enormous potential for helping rural people empower themselves. So El Limon received electricity and a 900 MHz freewave radio link at the same time, and in 1999 Katz recruited a group of Cornell students to construct a wireless network.

“The villagers were excited about using a computer for the first time,” recalled Katz, who still lives in El Limon most of the year. “They taught themselves a lot and eventually organized a group of young people to teach others.”

The impact was immediate. El Limon had always relied on intermediate organizations to assist it in obtaining funding for things like trucks, buildings and educational materials. Through e-mail, village heads can now deal directly with those allocating money for such projects.

The biggest change is in education: While El Limon's tiny school library holds few resources schoolchildren find useful, with Web access kids can come up with data and information even their teachers don't know.

Online chatting became a hit with El Limon's teenagers about a year ago. One illiterate 18-year-old so wanted to reach out to young people in Colombia and other Spanish-speaking nations that he taught himself how to read and write. Another met his girlfriend in Puerto Rico online.

The project was funded by small donations from entities such as the United Nations and Cornell University, as well as a three-year, $74,000 grant from the Inter-American Foundation. Thanks to donations from Cisco Systems, three other 802.11b networks are under construction that will cover six communities. The connections will allow faster speeds that Katz hopes might enable distance learning via streaming video.

“We're basically building a base of Dominican technical people learning the ins and outs of 802.11b,” said Katz.

It's not easy: 802.11b networks may be relatively simple to put in an office, but erecting networks in 10-kilometer areas is no simple task. Access points are often required to lie 100 feet away from the computer, and Ethernet lines can cause interference problems.

Nine communities made up of 3000 people sit on the same ridge as El Limon, and Katz is looking for an industry partner and funding for equipment to build a mesh network connecting them. Some villages don't have electricity, so solar panels and batteries will power their networks.

Katz's vision for a people he has grown to love and respect never seems to end. He's now working on developing a relationship with Sun Microsystems that could create a Linux education project based in El Limon, and he's hoping he might convince some Silicon Valley engineers to come and teach the kids how to set up a Cobalt server. He's even thinking of becoming El Limon's Internet service provider.

“These communities haven't had much experience with computers, much less networks,” said Katz. “We're trying to identify what they need to create projects and transfer organizational skills. The psychological side is that they can do these things after 500 years of being told they can't.”