[Following articles appeared in MSNBC on August 26, 1997 covering therecent trip made by Dan Haig and the company to Dharamsala to set up the Gangkyi (LAN) local area network. TS]

Soledad: Give me a little history of Tibet. Where were you when you went out to the Himalayas exactly, and how did this fit in with what's going on in Tibet?

Dan Haig: A brief history of Tibet would be that of a civilization that's been in the Himalayas for over 2,000 years, a very large nation, about as big as the United States west of the Mississippi. In 1959, the Chinese invasion proved to be too much for the Dalai Lama and his government. They fled, and about a hundred thousand Tibetans have also fled too from the Chinese terrorists.

Soledad: And they fled to Dharamsala?

Haig: They fled to India and Nepal. The Indian government very kindly gave the Tibetan government base to set up in exile in Dharamsala, which is in the northern tip of India.

Soledad: So what brought you to Dharamsala?

Haig: I'd been interested in Tibet for quite some time, and I went there originally to attend some courses. Spoke to their computer resource director, and he eventually asked me to set up this LAN this network that we over there to set up.

Soledad: So you were brought in to really help the government in exile figure out ways to communicate better. Who are they trying to communicate with the people back in Tibet, with other people around the world, or with everybody?

Haig: Well, they want to open up channels of communication for their own people. The Tibetans are scattered around the world right now. There's a large diaspora population in many countries, on every continent. They'd like to be able to stay in touch with each other. Also there are a lot of people in the West that are involved in Tibet support work, and they need to be able to communicate effectively with the Tibetan government.

Soledad: Dan, you obviously have a very personal stake in Tibet. Rick, how about you?

Richard Schneider: Well, Dan called me and asked me if I wanted to go to India to set up a LAN and my answer took about two and a half seconds. I'm kind of a workaholic.

Soledad: LAN is local

Schneider: I'm sorry. Local area network. It's like in your office or home. You can communicate with multiple computers, servers and printers and the like. But Dan asked me to go, and I went because it sounded like a big adventure, and I'm the only wire jockey he knows.

Soledad: Basically, you hit up your friends for help in doing this project. When you got there, what was there? How were they communicating? Because obviously they're getting information to the government-in-exile to the world. How's that working?

Haig: Well, there were the normal channels of using the post, but the post is not very reliable out of India. Faxes and telephones are also less than perfectly reliable.