Jorge Arango

It’s cliché to be inspired by athletes, but Roz Savage is in a category by herself. In 2006, the 5 foot 4 inches tall English woman completed a solo crossing of the Atlantic ocean in a rowboat, and is now in the midst of a Pacific crossing. (She recently completed the first leg of her trans-Pacific challenge by rowing from San Francisco to Waikiki in just under 100 days.)

Apart from her awesome accomplishments, Roz’s story is particularly inspiring because she came to her calling late (at 34), after having led a successful career in the city of London. She’d become disenchanted with the routine…

Roz knew she needed to change the way she lived her life, so sat down to write two versions of her obituary. One version told the story of her life as she was living it then. Conventional, ordinary and pleasant, with occasional moments of excitement, yet always within the safe confines of normality.

The second was the obituary that she wanted to have. “I thought of the obituaries that I enjoyed reading, the people that I admired. They were the adventurers and risk-takers, the people who seemed to have lived many lifetimes in one. The people who had tried lots of things, some of them successes, some of them spectacular failures, but at least they’d had the guts to try. I realized that if I repeated today’s actions 365 times, I wouldn’t be where I wanted to be in a year – or in ten years, or at the end of my life.”

You can read the rest of her story in her website, which is the other thing that sets Roz apart as a role model: she is extensively documenting her experience online. She writes in great detail about how she trains physically and psychologically, how she plans meals, how the boat is designed, the equipment she has on board (including three iPods—she lists her favorite playlists!), emergency plans, etc. She’s even rigged the boat so that she can blog and podcast from the middle of the ocean!

In order to keep motivated, Roz keeps a little whiteboard in front of her rowing seat where she writes quotes from people who’ve inspired her. I’m doing the same, and Roz is on my list.

Photo: copyright Roz Savage

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I’m constantly asked this question, so a couple of years ago I set out in search of an answer I could feel comfortable giving out. Turns out harder than you’d expect: countries don’t usually provide very comprehensive data of this sort.

The best source I’ve found thus far is the CIA World Factbook, so that’s what I’ve been using for my yearly report over on my Spanish blog. (Here’s the latest). It’s worth noting that the data is not accurate for all countries: stats for some of them were last provided as long as six years ago. Still, it’s better than nothing. Besides, data on the larger countries is fairly recent, so overall I think it’s as good a source as any. (I’ve noted the year of the last available data in a separate column.)

Some interesting highlights:

• Since I started doing this in 2006, internet penetration in the region has increased from 14.1% to 22.33%.
• Brazil, the largest country in the region, has more than 25% of its population online. (50m people.)
• The countries of Central America lag seriously behind: only 11% of the population is online; our total market of internet users is about 4.6m people. (Compare with the Caribbean islands, which have 7.6m people online, even though they have a smaller population than the Central American countries.)

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