At the outset of our interview, Pema Chhophyel pauses to check a silent signal from his cell phone. He glances at the phone and smiles. "Oh, it's just a reminder I have this interview with Joyce," he says.

Chhophyel would appear to be a child of the Internet age, yet he began life in one of the most remote villages in eastern Bhutan. From there, he embarked on a remarkable odyssey that led him to the capital city of Thimphu, where he attended high school and assisted his cousin in founding the first Internet café in the land. A series of serendipitous encounters eventually brought him to Eugene, where he's now completing a business degree at the UO and serving as operations VP for the student chapter of the American Marketing Association.

Chhophyel's personal journey from rural past to wired present is all the more impressive considering the Internet was not introduced in Bhutan until 1999. Prior to that, television was also unknown in the country. This slow introduction of technology was by design, part of a government strategy to maintain a cultural balance between old and new and ensure that "Gross National Happiness" took precedence over GNP.

Chhophyel immediately took to the new technology, and thanks to the popularity of his cousin's Internet café and a UN grant that funded free Internet access to Bhutanese students, he soon found himself teaching Internet basics to café patrons and schoolchildren alike.

Once in the U.S., Chhophyel went on to explore specialized technologies few students would ever encounter. His job as a language consultant in the UO's Department of Linguistics introduced him to audio transcriber software that creates sound files from the spoken word. With the aid of this software, he's been able to communicate from a distance with UO researchers in the field who are helping to create a written language for Kurtoep, his native dialect.

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