Sister Isabelle Smyth is probably Ireland's most wired nun. Since first going online in 1991 with a 1200-baud connection to CompuServe, she has become the Director of Communications of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, editing its Healing And Development newsletter and maintaining its Web site (www.medical-missionaries.com) from her office in Booterstown, Co Dublin.
Sister Isabelle, a nun for 36 years, has spent the past 10 years working with computers, and displays a fluency which would leave many a software engineer embarrassed. Having travelled throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe, she now hops between an ancient Apple Mac on which she produces the magazine, and a less aged PC for connecting to the Web and bulletin boards. She says she loves the Mac, and intends to use it until it breaks, though when we met she was busy installing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 on the PC, and half an hour later she was connected to IMULink via an older, clunky DOS program.
She teaches computer skills to missionaries and overseas development volunteers, taking them from DOS to the latest in multimedia capabilities. She likes to make sure students understand DOS, because, as she puts it, you never know when someone will unearth an old machine which still works perfectly.
As we talked, a typical missionary computer problem was demonstrated in an incoming email: a nun in Tanzania had just spent 2 1/2 hours running an anti-virus programme on an old XT machine. "At the end . . . it told me to insert the diskette with COMMAND.COM which I didn't have," wrote Sister Marian Scena in Makiungu. "I couldn't get past it so eventually I powered down. The next day . . . I ran the sweep again and it detected no viruses so it obviously worked." Who said DOS was dead?
Sister Isabelle's order is supportive of her computer habit. In fact, the order was founded in Nigeria in 1937 by the late Mother Mary Martin, an Irish nun whose policy was to embrace what Sister Isabelle calls "appropriate use of modern technology".
Besides her two computers in her office, she says she has a notebook and modem in her room. "The computer is an extension of my body," she says. "I never leave home without one." Having spent three months last year travelling in Africa without Internet access, she finally collected email in the heart of the Turkana desert in Kenya. This spurred her on in her commitment to connect communities and reduce the information gap between rich and poor. A cybernun on a mission from God, she won't give up easily.