I believe that Peace Corps volunteers can carry the information revolution right through those portals and far beyond. Let me explain how. Virtually every Peace Corps volunteer sworn in today is adept at using computers, integrating information technology, and accessing the Internet. In many respects, they are comparative experts when they arrive in their overseas communities. There may be 50 million Web sites, but most of the people in the developing world have never made a telephone call, much less sat in front of a computer and surfed the Internet.
Volunteers can change that.
They can turn the traditional pattern of the poor getting technology last, upside down. Let me give some examples of what our volunteers are doing right now. In Ghana, I met a young man from Seattle, who thought he was going to teach math at a high school in the capital city of Accra. The school director, however, asked him if he knew what could be done with fifteen computers that had arrived but seemed not to work. He suddenly became the director of the school's computer literacy program.