WELCOME TO LANTAW

My name is Allan Mendoza. I'm 29, an electronics engineer, born and raised here in Iloilo City, and this is my café. Lantaw is our Hiligaynon word for looking out, taking in the view. I picked it because a computer on the Internet is a window you look out of. Since we put the camera up, it's also a window people can look in through, from anywhere in the world. More about that below. It turned out to be the best thing we ever did, and I didn't even plan it.

We're on the second floor, upstairs from a bakery, on a side street near three of the colleges. If you can smell bread, you're at the right door. Come up.

What's upstairs:

• 12 Pentium computers with 15-inch monitors, all networked together
• One leased line, so it's always on. No dialing, no busy signal, no waiting for your Tita to get off the phone.
• Two window air conditioners and a ceiling fan. In Iloilo you know why this matters.
• Monobloc chairs (please read house rule number 1)
• The counter, with a printer and a scanner, and Lalaine

WHO WE ARE

RATES AND HOURS

Bring your ID or it's P40, even if you look like a student. Lalaine doesn't make exceptions, not even for our cousins. Especially not for our cousins.

HOUSE RULES

1. No feet on the chairs. They're monobloc, not hammocks.
2. No food at the keyboards. One spilled softdrink costs us a keyboard. Eat at the counter, we don't mind.
3. No bad sites. Noel checks. He walks behind every chair, and he will call your name out loud.
4. Wait your turn. Lalaine keeps the list. Fighting over a seat means you go to the bottom of it.
5. Whoever plays music without earphones buys the next round of softdrinks. For everybody. This rule has paid for a lot of softdrinks.

THE CAFECAM

The camera sits on the shelf above the counter and looks across the whole room. The counter computer takes a picture every two minutes while we're open and sends it up to this page. I put it up for the students: from the colleges it's a short walk but a steep climb, and nobody likes climbing our stairs on a hot afternoon just to find all twelve seats taken and five people already waiting. Now they check from the computer lab first. Some of them even check from their own computers at home, which I think is very funny, but they still come, so I'm not complaining.

That was the plan. Then the Nanays found it.

THE SUNDAY WAVE

On Sunday mornings, after Mass, the mothers and the lolas come up our stairs. They come to write e-mail to their children who are working abroad: in Saudi, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, on the ships. Some of them have never touched a computer before. Some of them can't type, or their eyes aren't good anymore, so Lalaine sits with them and types while they talk. Before noon, she does it free. I told her once that she was giving away the store. She told me to go mop something.

Then one Sunday a son on the other side of the world wrote back to his mother that he had opened our page and seen her at the computer. Now some families set a time. The one abroad opens this page at that hour, and his mother sits in the near row where the camera can see her face, and she looks up and waves.

Sunday, September 19, 10:04 a.m. That's Nanay Florencia in the near row on the left, turned around in her chair for her son Ricardo, who is a seaman on a container ship. She comes every other Sunday at ten. She waved, but the camera only takes one picture every two minutes and her hand was faster, so what you get is the smile. Lalaine is next to her at the keyboard in the white shirt, typing what Nanay tells her. Ricardo, she says to tell you she's fine, she's taking her vitamins, and amping.

Nanay Florencia's next Sunday is October 3, at ten o'clock. Maayong aga, Nanay! We'll save your chair.

I can tell you the word the Sunday mothers type more than any other. It's palangga. I didn't build this place for them. But when people ask me what Lantaw is for, they're the ones I think of first.

FOR THE NANAYS AND LOLAS: HOW TO SEND E-MAIL TO YOUR ANAK

Lalaine explains all of this at the counter in Hiligaynon, slowly, as many times as you need. Here it is for your anak to read too, so they know what you are doing on our end.

1. Come up and tell Lalaine you want to send e-mail. You don't need to know anything else. Really.
2. Bring your anak's e-mail address, written on paper. It has a little @ in the middle (we say "at") and dots. Copy it exactly, every dot. One wrong letter and your letter goes nowhere.
3. If you don't have an e-mail address of your own, we'll make you one. It's free and takes five minutes. Lalaine will write your address and your password on a card for you. Keep the card in your wallet and don't show it to anybody.
4. Write your letter. Type it yourself, slowly, with one finger, there's no hurry. Or tell it to Lalaine and she types. English, Hiligaynon, Tagalog, anything. The computer doesn't mind.
5. Press Send. Your letter arrives in minutes, not weeks.
6. Come back next Sunday to read the answer. If you want to bring it home, Lalaine can print it for you, P5 a page. A lot of the Nanays keep them in a folder.

Salamat gid to every Nanay who has trusted us with her letters.

FRIDAY LAN NIGHT

Every Friday at 10 p.m. we close the door, Noel switches all twelve machines over to the network games, and nobody leaves until 6 in the morning. P100 for the whole night. We play StarCraft, Red Alert and Age of Empires. Most of the room is StarCraft. The Age of Empires players are quieter and older and they take the two machines by the window.

Saturday, September 25, 1:40 a.m. The Friday-night crowd. We switch off the tube lights at LAN night because the screens are easier on the eyes that way. (Noel says that's the reason. I think it's so nobody can see him losing.) The two standing in the middle are watching over a friend's shoulder. On the near table: empty softdrink bottles, a bag of bread from downstairs that Lalaine bought before the bakery closed, and the ladder sheet under the desk lamp.

STARCRAFT LADDER: SEPTEMBER 1999

One on one. Noel draws the matches out of a cup at 10. Every win is a point. The top two play best of three at 5 a.m. Handles only. What happens at LAN night stays under your handle.

Friday winners: September 3, Bagyo. September 10, NoRushPlz, who finally learned how to stop a rush and has not stopped talking about it. September 17, Bagyo. September 24, Bagyo again, two games to one, at 5:40 in the morning, with the whole room standing behind the two chairs.

September champion: Bagyo. Three Friday nights out of four. Your prize is the free LAN night on October 1 and a softdrink on the house. Everybody else: he's beatable. NoRushPlz did it once. Probe4Life, keep coming, you're improving, and you're the only one who never forgets his earphones.

OPENING DAY

We opened on Saturday, November 7, 1998, at 9 in the morning. Our mother came at 8:30 with a box of bread from downstairs, because she says it's good luck to buy from your neighbor on your first day, and she prayed over the counter. Then she sat on a monobloc chair by the door with her arms folded and watched the stairs like a security guard.

Our first customer came up at 9:20: a nursing student who had to print a paper due at 10. The printer jammed on page two. I thought my heart would stop. Noel had it open and fixed in about four minutes, and she ran down the stairs with ten minutes to spare. Lalaine took the first five-peso coin and taped it to the wall behind the counter. It's still there. Ask to see it.

By three in the afternoon all twelve were full, and two students were sitting on the stairs waiting. That night, after midnight, Lalaine counted the money twice, wrote it in her notebook, closed the notebook and said, "Okay. We can do this." That is the most my sister has ever said about money in one sentence.

Saturday, June 12, Independence Day. One of our regulars lent us his digital camera, the kind that saves the pictures straight onto a floppy disk, so here we are behind the counter. That's me in navy with my arms crossed, trying to look like a businessman, and Lalaine with her notebook and calculator, laughing at me for trying. On the counter: the printer, the scanner, the candy jar for the kids who behave, and our little flag for the day. Behind us, the two rows and the air conditioner on the far wall.

HOW I CAME HOME FROM SINGAPORE

After I finished engineering I did what a lot of us do. I went abroad. From 1995 to 1998 I worked in Singapore as a test engineer at an electronics factory. I wrote test programs, chased down why boards failed, and worked a lot of night shifts. It was good work and good training, and I'm grateful for it. I shared a flat with other Filipino engineers, ate a lot of rice in front of a lot of television, and saved almost everything I made.

Every Sunday I wrote e-mail to Lalaine. She was working in an accounting office then, and she read my letters at lunch on the office computer, printed them, and read them out loud to our mother at the dinner table. Our mother never once answered by e-mail. She wrote letters on blue paper, and they came weeks after she mailed them, and I read every one of them three times. I thought a lot, on those night shifts, about how many mothers in Iloilo were writing letters on blue paper to children who had computers in front of them all day.

I came home in May 1998 with my savings, a plan in a spiral notebook, and a cough from three years of factory air conditioning. People asked me why I didn't open in Manila. Because this is home. My mother is here, the colleges are here, and there are a lot of students who need a computer and don't have one at home. It took six months: finding the place over the bakery, painting the walls green (Lalaine picked the color), waiting for the leased line, which was the longest part, and setting up twelve computers with Noel, who knows more about them than I do and isn't afraid to tell me.

I didn't come home to get rich. I came home to come home. But I'm proud of this place, and I'm proud that it pays for itself, and I'm proudest on Sunday mornings.

Salamat gid to everyone who climbs our stairs. Amping!

Allan