An hour drive into the setting sun brought me to Alamosa, a town of 8000 people, a teachers college, and home to several of the MIRA CSOs. Ben Beachy is not a native of Colorado. He is a Mennonite volunteer from Virginia who came to work in the CSO, San Luis Valley Christian Community Services after leaving college before graduation. His computer skills include LAN configuration, computer assembly, web design, programming, and wireless network management. In short, just about everything short of chip fabrication! I could imagine how he would be called upon to help out with all aspects. "The CSO roped me into managing the project, and there was enough money to pay me, so I worked as contract labor, trying to do administrative work and also write a lot of the reports for Kellogg."

Since he arrived he has seen the skills within non-profits grow and interests in using email and other Internet applications increase a lot. However, he designed a system for eValle.org that included threaded conferencing and other interactive features, but that has rarely been used. It is very similar to the experience by Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho. I mentioned that many locally developed programs with seemingly useful features are sometimes ignored totally by the target audience. Beachy remarked,"I wished somebody had told me that a year and a half ago!" Beachy also managed El Telar, the San Luis Valley Rural Telecommunications Project that began as an electronic bulletin board serving local users who needed mail access. This began before MIRA and is still being used by a few hundred people whose phone lines are not fast enough to access the Web. A line speed of 14.4 kbps is a good connection for some of these people. He also managed an innovative medium speed wireless project in north Conejos county in the town of La Jara where he lived. There were not enough phone lines, and frequently people were unable to make outgoing calls because of the shortage of circuits. The group, half of whom were high school kids, determined which individuals were involved in community service of some sort, and they were given wireless connections and a 64 kb/sec dedicated speed between amigo.net in Alamosa and La Jara. This proved to be a big success and MIRA money paied for a good deal of the equipment for the homes. Each subscriber still had to pay the basic monthly Internet fee. This service is still going strong.

In listening to Beachy I realize that he must have grown a great deal during the time he spent in Colorado. In June 2001 he was returning home to Pennsylvania and eventually back to college in Virginia. Though he signaled his frustration with some aspects of MIRA by calling it by that ever popular euphemism, a learning experience, I sensed that he had provided an immense range of technical assistance.