Lighthouses beacon the children´s seaway through Internet 
INTERNET OnLine introduce a non-profit project

The original objective of the project was to sweeten ill children their long-term stay in hospitals all over the Czech Republic by means of Internet. The project has two stages. In the first, INTERNET OnLine has bought 35 computers for specialised wards in hospitals and connected them to Internet. In the second stage it started to prepare on the Web special pages the children would visit during their stay in hospital. Nonetheless it turned out that Lighthouses, day by day richer and richer in content, are becoming gradually a server of all children, who want to create something, look for new friends on Internet, and also to educate themselves. The unique Lighthouses project of two partners - INTERNET OnLine and Charta 77 Foundation got over the first six months of a very productive life. Since the launch of the project in autumn 1999, on the Internet pages www.majaky.cz appeared not only a lot of new games, entertainment and education for children, but also a pleiad of celebrities, starting from actor Jiří Lábus, through actor Jan Čenský, singer Daniel Hůlka, ice-hockey player Vladimír Růžička to the songstress Iveta Bartošová. Besides on-line chatting with children on the Internet, all of them also visited the special wards in the hospitals, where the project is realised. Since the launch of the project, i.e. since November 2, 1999, 70.000 visitors entered the system. To the most interesting joins belong Japan and the U.S.A.; Lighthouses have also attracted Czech children living in Turkey, Ausrtalia, Germany, and New Zealand. In the last days we recorded connections from Lithuania, Finnland, Ukraine, Singapore, China, Cyprus, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia. These data are a clear evidence of the fact that Lighthouses are not solely an internal matter of the interconnected hospitals, but that it can be joined by anyone from anywhere. "We are nicely surprised above all at the helpfulness of the attending physicians, who, like we, understand one of the priorities of this project - breaking the isolation of the child´s patients and enabling their communication with the neighbourhood", comments the Lighthouses project Martin Kovář from Charta 77 Foundation. "All our effort is currently concentrated on the enrichment of the content of the Web pages. We learned from the children´s reactions that there are still things to be modified or improved. We would also like to interconnect Lighthouses with other activities for children on the Czech Internet," says the PR manager of INTERNET OnLine, a division of Czech Telecom, Jana Voňavková. The children can thus (after a simple registration) write their own newspaper, read fairy tales and also prepare them for other children, talk in "chat", send congratulations. They can create their own clubs, play a large number of games - even on-line, with their playmate in another town or at another computer. Entering the Lighthouses they automatically obtain their own mailbox and e-mail address, based on the nickname they chose. Lighthouses is a rich web world, where no one has a chance to get bored. If by chance a Lighthouse subscriber wishes to peek in somewhere else, the ROZCESTNIK offers him a thematic list of links. The last interest is the placement of world-esteemed programming language for beginners of all ages "Baltík" at Lighthouses. Hot innovation is the Fairytales hit-parade - a special opinion poll about their most favorite TV fairytale characters. Thanks to the helpfulness of the producers of the Czech TV children magazine Zirafa the children have every two months a possibility to see one episode of the fairytale with the winning tale character directly in the Sunday transmission of Zirafa. Nevertheless, the biggest response receive "chats" with celebrities. Some of them, e.g. Jan Čenský, have enthused over chatting on Lighthouses so much that they do not miss a single opportunity to return to Lighthouses on their own will. "Once I have nearly missed the beginning of the performance. During a theatre run, before the performance I had visited the local Internet café and talked with the children. I was so deeply dug in chatting, that a collegue must have come to literally deport me me into the theatre; otherwise I would have missed the show," says smiling Jan Čenský. The Lighthouse chatting joined also an ice-hockey player, world- and Nagano olympics champion Vladimír Růžička. He talked to children from the Prague hospital in Motol. Daniel Hůlka visited Lighthouses in April. The chatting lasted one hour and the children wondered most whether Dan will get a short haircut sometime in the future. Some questions were really catchy. "Why don´t you sing opera, when you studied it? You do not like it or you prefer big money?" asked Alešák. Dan Hůlka answered that he liked to sing good music no matter which genre it ever was. Another famous singer, who visited the children hospitalised at the neurological ward of the Thomayer Hospital, was Iveta Bartošová. Her chatting with children was about music, singing, but mainly about life and all its joyful as well as shady sides. She was most amused by two partners (aged 11 and 12), nicknamed Fractures. According to them, their writing on the computer was a difficult job, as they both had their right hand broken. The actor from Theatre Ypsilon, Petr Vacek, appeared in Lighthouses in June. If you are curious what he talked about with the children, visit the pages www.majaky.cz, where you can find the complete archive of all chats.
 

Since the project start, INTERNET OnLine has connected 6 Czech hospitals - special wards of hospitals in Ústí nad Labem, Olomouc, Plzeň, Brno, and two in Prague - the Thomayer Hospital in Krč and the hospital in Motol. During the holidays, another two hospitals should become plugged in. INTERNET OnLine thus tries to fill its motto in the Internet environment: Get connected and Get amused in another way!