SUVA (Fiji) 5th October 2006 -- OK so let's be clear.  Only tourists regard the Fiji Islands as paradise. If you were born there or live there you may come to a different perception. As for telecommunications, rural Fijian villages may not even have a phone!  Don't get me wrong. Fijians are grateful for God's gifts of nature all around them. But by and large they are poor by western standards and digitally speaking even poorer. Enter FOSS. What follows is a description of grass-roots promotion of Free and Open Source Software.
Natovi village
    Natovi village on the Eastern cost of Viti Levu, Fiji's central island (there are some 349 other islands) has no phone line, and few computers. The primary school, with a million dollar island view, does not have any real dollars to its name. Its one computer (in a condemned building) had a copy of Windows but no programs. Clearly a set case for FOSS and probably even Linux. I gave them all but the latter, then trained them to use the programs. It did not take argument to convince the village of the simple benefits of FOSS!
Waikete village
    Waikete, a little closer to civilisation but still a challenge to reach on a wet day, which is most days in September, has a phone. There is also a small community centre with three computers. The community has a committee which runs the centre – available for largely unemployed young hopefuls to learn some computing basics. They had a little more to benefit from this time, browser and all.
Nausori town
    Note the 'town'. 20 kms out of Suva, Nausori ran regular risk of separation from Suva because of a bailey bridge long past its use-by date. No bridge meant a 500 km round trek to cover the 20 kms to Suva, or swim for it! A month ago, the EU-funded new bridge opened Nausori town to higher urban ambitions and rightly so. It also became the piéce de resistance of FOSS promotion in Fiji, for at the heart of Nausori town, in a converted convent, the Daughters of Charity with the help of one or two Salesians, have opened the St Louise Development Centre, to provide office-related skills like computer training, touch-typing for the unemployed, school dropouts, regardless of religion, colour, creed, race or age. Sr Patricia McLaughlin has four staff members who help train the students, each of them a former 'student' of the Centre.
    What an open opportunity for Open Source, Free Software! None of those students has a dime to spare on anything but the basics to live on. Instruction at the Centre is free. Sr Patricia was the first and most avid of FOSS learners and soon saw that all computers in the centre were duly endowed. They continue to teach word processing with MSWord, which is the only word processing candidates are likely to find in their employment, but side-by-side they now teach another approach to word processing, one which separates content from formatting and makes for more efficient word processing. Intelligence is not restricted by poverty, only the opportunity to access the right information.
It did not stop there
    SLDC has something like 180 students who pass through its hourly courses weekly. Now Fiji is a religious nation: Christians, Muslims and Hindus live more or less happily together. I found it useful to present the benefits of FOSS to them from four e-perspectives – evangelical (Muslims and Hindus were happy to allow a Christian term for the sake of an 'e'), educational, ethical and economical. When you have money, arguments based on money come first. When you do not, other arguments may come first, though each student immediately appreciated the possibility of non-cost or low-cost software. They also appreciated that no longer did they need to pirate the stuff, and not a few could see that word processing the 'Writer' way, was educationally more sound. A few found a deeper 'evangelical' principle attractive, that we do not need to have everything when we can have a workable simpler version. Why be greedy when I don't need all that creeping featurism?
And the commercial, academic and professional world?
    Fiji has to live in a real and globalised world; it has its IT firms, its software and hardware vendors, its University, its professions. Some low-level contacts across that spectrum showed that but for the elite few, FOSS was unknown and unpractised. No surprise, then, that the supply firm for SLDC's two dozen computers found the new scene of interest. The boss now has to determine whether this innovation means more or less dollars or is neutral! The university has every reason to be interested, but that has to be another venture. One of Fiji's oldest legal firms showed immediate and practical interest. A group of indigenous Sisters who serve the poorest of the poor in the poorest of places in Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, called their entire regional council in to learn how to obtain and use FOSS.
Which approach is best?
    I would imagine there are three basic approaches to promoting FOSS. One would be to begin with the computer-literate and work down. Another would be to go for the middle range of regular, well-provided users and work out. A third would be to start with those wallowing in the encroaching waters of unequal opportunity or downright poverty and work up, an image not lost on islanders battling to keep 21st century seas from swallowing up their dalo and cassava plots.
    I decided to go swimming! JBF
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