7b broaden the reach of effictive computing support into new environments requires di~ rent technologies fkom those we are accustomed to designing and using. One of the key aspects of the India Healthcare Project is to cons~ ont unj~ miliar conditions and contexts in order to prototype ef~ ctive hand-held computing support:~ r rural Indian healthcare workers. The project involves introducing a technology relatively new to us (Newton), with unj~ miliar characteristics (size, display, pen-input), to a community of users with which we were initially total~ un)~ miliar, doing a job about which we knew virtual& nothing. Additional~, we needed to localize Newton soj~ ware and the MessagePad hardware j~ r Indian languages and physical conditions. In this paper, we lay out the challenges associated with such an undertaking, the strategies we have adopted, the current chronology of theproject, some aspects of our current design, and ourpreliminary findingsJ~ om fleld testing.