Internet Cafe fighting Alcoholism?

The WHO released a report this last week that shows how much alcohol the world drinks.  As one interpretation of the report said, “Europeans drink a lot of booze, and the Arab-Islamic world does not.”  Also, according to the report, Moldovans drink the most with over 18 liters person per year with a majority of that being “home brews” which is scary since many of these brews can be damaging to people’s health.  It’s estimated that this leads to 2.5 million deaths per year world wide.  It’s estimated that 1 in 5 male deaths in Russia and the former satellite states is caused by alcohol.

With eDOT, I got the privilege of spending some time in Moldova, the small country nestled between Ukraine and Romania.  Moldova, a former Soviet state, is the poorest country in Europe with 4.3 million people.  We worked on a project to increase the abilities of a small internet cafe in a village called Antoneşti.  (You can check out more at their website – Communitas.md)

So how does an Internet Cafe fight alcoholism?  Well, I have to say, it wasn’t something that we were intentional about.  To improve this internet cafe, we purchased more computers and then I went to help install some Internet Cafe software along with Internet filtering and some other things to raise the bar of how the Internet cafe was being run.  Before I showed up, the Internet Cafe worked by the process of when a person came in to use a computer, the Cafe operator would mark on a piece of paper what time the person began using the computer and when they were done.  Then they would go to the operator who then figured out how much time they used and would charge them for the time at a hourly rate.  It’s called a post-pay method and is fairly standard in Eastern Europe.  With the Internet Cafe software we installed, it made it so that people would have accounts and the system would handle monitoring how much time people spent on the computers and would automatically deduct it from their accounts.  This is called a pre-pay method and is used in the Western world a lot as a way to increase business and customer retention.  It was this pre-pay that changed how people were spending their money in the community.

So up until this point, people would receive their paychecks and spend it on what they want/needed at the time – food, clothes, alcohol, etc.  There are no banks and with inflation like it is, you don’t just save money for later – you spend it.  However, the people of this village would end up needing to go to the Internet Cafe so that they could create things for their businesses, check on weather reports and crop prices, etc but would find themselves without the money to do so.  Now with the pre-pay system, people started thinking ahead with their paychecks.  They knew that they would need to visit the Internet cafe later but that they had the money now so they would go in and put money on their accounts.  Some even started putting extra money in their accounts that they knew they would need as cash later but storing their money at the Internet Cafe was safer (due to the security and safe the Internet Cafe had) than keeping it in their homes.  One of the directors of Communitas announced to me that he felt like the banker for the community.

So how does this relate to lower alcoholism?  Well, because people were starting to plan out what their paychecks would pay for and had a way to save for it safely, they slowed their impulse buying of liquors (and materials to make “home brews”) effectively reducing their alcohol consumption according to Igor, executive director of Communitas.  While we haven’t done a study or anything to determine how much reduction has happened, any dent to getting people to move from a dependence on alcohol and to seeing their need for a relationship with God is a positive.