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TheBuzz

BY ERIKA ENGLE

Tuesday, September 4, 2001

The wiring of the
Big Isle’s Hamakua Coast

IN the little community of Honomu, north of Hilo, Ishigo Store was the town center, the gathering place. It's no longer a store but folks still gather there in its new incarnation as the Honomu Computer Resource Center.

With $15,000 in funding from the Kellogg Foundation under its Managing Information with Rural America program, the Honomu center is one of four community tech centers along the Hamakua Coast, and one of seven MIRA sites on the Big Island. The center's fledgling virtual home is at www. hamakuacoast.net.

Claudia Woodward-Rice, the center's coordinator, sees educational, business and recreational purposes among the goals of the center and the Web site. They're being achieved in fits and starts, as there's not a lot of money to throw around -- funding for paid staff ran out over the summer, she said.

"Chris Drayer is a media specialist and distance-learning person at Hawaii Community College -- and with us he's mostly a volunteer but sometimes a consultant so we pay him when we can," Woodward-Rice said.

Ron Borden of Kona's Seismic Internet company also falls into the sometimes paid, sometimes volunteer category. "He's a real generous community-oriented guy, and we have to be careful not to take advantage of him," she said.

MIRA centers host computer training and other classes for adults with an eye toward work force development. "The digital divide is a cliche but it's true," said Woodward-Rice. "The skills that people need to make it in the world and that employers are looking for in the workplace definitely involve tech- nology."

She has seen changes in cognitive development among schoolchildren who stop in for educational games, "but it happens with adults too." A grandmother with no computer ex- perience who received help finding a Honolulu newspaper obituary online became a daily visitor, e-mailing her grandkids "and printing e-mails to take home to her husband who'd had knee surgery," Woodward-Rice said. "Now she's got her own computer. Her learning curve was almost scary -- it's like 'get out of the way.' "

"We have people coming by from every country imaginable," as they are on the way to Akaka Falls. "You never know who might stop in to check their e-mail."

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Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com