I love an AP story in a recent IHT about Le Hien Duc, a gray-haired 75-year-old grandmother who has become the scourge of corrupt officials in Vietnam. But it was one sentence towards the end of the piece that caught my eye:
Duc runs her crusade from her narrow, three-story home in Hanoi, where her desk is covered with stacks of mail from people seeking help from all corners of Vietnam. She spends about two-thirds of her US$80 monthly pension on the Internet, phone calls, photocopying and motorbike taxis.
I’ve been researching a piece about the digital divide in this part of the world and that kind of figure reminds me how much people still have to pay. So I thought I’d do another one of my surveys, this time on connectivity costs. Please drop by and fill it in it the mood takes you.