Many other poor Cambodians, however, are still left out of the digital loop.

PREDATING all these initiatives, however, is Open Forum of Cambodia's information exchange service that began in the mid-1990s. Then and now it had mailing lists in English and Khmer on specific topics that relate to Cambodian life, such as the national elections, women's issues, the HIV/AIDS menace, government's decentralization policy and the state of reporting by the Cambodian media.

The CIC portal's technology partner responsible for collecting data to be posted on the site, Open Forum is credited primarily for pioneering the use of Khmer fonts in writing e-mail and in websites through a simple technology of automatic font download. It is also supporting and coordinating initiatives for the development of free Khmer-language software.

But even the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications admits to the country's backwardness in terms of ICT. With a poor fixed line network of only 30,000 lines capable of serving only 26 percent of the population, dial-up access to the Internet has remained limited to the urban areas. Then again, less than one percent of rural households have access to publicly supplied electricity, with 86 percent relying on kerosene as a source of light.

The political uncertainty of almost a year without a newly constituted government has also taken its toll on badly needed infrastructure projects. Just recently ended, the impasse made Cambodia less attractive in the eyes of foreign donors and private investors.

Still, it's not as if the government had no other pressing concerns to attend to. Cambodia, after all, achieved a semblance of peace only in 1993 after 30 years of warfare and civil unrest. At this point, the greater challenge the government is facing is how to rebuild and develop the country's physical and economic infrastructure ravaged by the recent conflicts.

"If you have hundreds of thousands of children who don't have access to education, millions of people who don't have access to primary health care, then having access to information tends to pale in the political spectrum comparatively," observes Tweedie. "So it may be an issue of trying to balance conflicting priorities or other demands on limited resources."

As it is, many are pointing to the lack the lack of basic literacy and access to education and the concomitant language problem as the more fundamental barriers to the full integration of all Khmers into the information society.

Majority of Khmers are either illiterate or semi-literate and cannot speak or read in English, the main language of the Internet. The Khmer Loeu, or the tribes that make up the majority of the population of Ratanakiri and the neighboring province of Mondolkiri, cannot read and write even in Khmer. In Dara Chanly's classes, teaching English and computer skills to indigenous students requires the services of a teacher assistant translating from the Kreung dialect to the national language and then to English, slowing down the learning process.

"It's very difficult," admits Dara Chanly. "I have to teach slowly. That way, students also learn very slowly." The usual three-month period for classes, for instance, may take her Kreung students up to six or nine months to complete.

All these are among the reasons why many aid agencies and NGOs have argued that simply wiring every corner of the country will not narrow the digital divide. According to Dr. Supote Prasestsri, education program specialists at the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the more appropriate response is "to think not in terms of individualized access but more of community-based access."

Tweedie says this is also why the community information centers were not located outside of the provincial capitals. "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," Tweedie adds, "technology is gonna come along in a time that's right."