Why am I a Mozillian

I come from a small village in Central Java, Indonesia. In my last year of elementary school, one of our classrooms collapsed because of a hurricane. It was terrible. We have to use an old classroom from an abandoned school close to our building. We should distribute the bookshelves from our library to another classes so we can so we can use the library as an emergency classroom. As a realization after that experience, I then challenge myself, “let’s see what the other part of the world can offer after you finish this phase.”

So I convince my parent to let me apply to a junior high school in the central city. I got accepted so they can’t argue too much. There is where I started to know the internet. The time when I started to see a broader view of the world besides of my small village.

But internet is still quite expensive at that time. I use a telephone cable to connect me to the internet (if you familiar with these number » 080989999, then you know what I mean). Mom will be mad at me every time I connect the telephone cable to the computer because the telephone bill will be so expensive. She even lock the PSTN unit so I can’t unplug its RJ11.

But thank God for internet cafes. Internet become way cheaper and I don’t need to use the telephone cable anymore. And there is where I started to know Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox is the first gate where I enter this internet world (After a brief dark time with Internet Explorer).

Now after 9 years, it’s hard to believe that I’m now a Mozilla Representative. My mom isn’t mad at me anymore for connecting myself to the internet. Now I even teach her how to use the internet. But I believe there are still many people that face the same issue as what I encountered 9 years ago. They have limited resources. And maybe even worse, they have no clue if there is a thing called internet that they can use to learn so many things, not limited to Facebook or Whatsapp. There, is where I would love to chip in. To let them know that the internet is all ours. We can make use of them to enrich our knowledge, to start a business, to uplift our life.

I believe in one value that I’m quite sure most people will agree. That is, we want this world to be a better place. So become a Mozillian, spread the web literacy, and telling people how to protect their online privacy is one of my attempts to make this world into a better place. And that is exactly why I enjoy being a Mozillian.