Word: cambodias
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...Cambodia hasn't excelled at much lately on the world stage, unless you're ranking countries for genocide and undetected landmines, of which it has an estimated 4-6 million. But the latter, grim though the connection may be, are the reason that the country is competing for a world title at the 2007 Standing Volleyball World Cup, taking place in its capital Phnom Penh...
...Planned by World Organization Volleyball for Disabled (WOVD), the event runs from Nov. 24 to Dec. 2, and is open to disabled athletes capable of standing, with or without a prosthesis (the WOVD also holds "sitting" volleyball tournaments for wheelchair-bound players). Ranked top in Asia, Cambodia is one of eight national teams competing for a trophy that local artists have fittingly sculpted from melted-down AK-47 assault rifles. Canada, the reigning champion, is the team to beat. The German squad is also highly rated. Out of the running are Afghanistan and Rwanda, who pulled their teams...
...Like those troubled nations, Cambodia has been ravaged by civil strife. The poisonous aftermath still lingers in mine-strewn soil, where the nation's farmers scrape a living. One of the consequences is that there's no lack of amputees keen to strap on an artificial limb and hit a ball over a net. Since 2002, a wet-season disabled volleyball league has nurtured a squad of high-flying semipro athletes who came fourth at the 2005 World Cup in Canada and are gunning for gold on home soil. Christian Zepp, 26, the team's German coach who arrived...
...Cambodia's volleyball players lost limbs to land mines. Some suffered polio or other childhood diseases, or were maimed by motorbike wipeouts on dangerous roads. Others are ex-combatants with nowhere to go: the Hawks, in the notorious Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin, field a mixed team of cashiered former rebels and government soldiers. From eight teams in 2002, the local league has grown to 16 sponsored squads in two divisions who compete for an annual $3,000 prize - a sum that goes a long way in rural Cambodia...
...that would be rugged enough to function in often harsh conditions. Prototypes of the laptop (dubbed XO) - with built-in video and audio, a hand-crank and low wattage requirements - are getting high marks from technology reviewers. Some 8,000 units are up and running in pilot villages from Cambodia to Uruguay. But perhaps an even more difficult task was to generate enough mass interest in the project to allow the computer to be produced on such a vast scale that costs could be kept down. The program's chief education officer, Argentine neurology professor Antonio Battro, who accompanied Negroponte...