A Worthy Tzedaka: XO Laptop Helps Children in The Third World

Yes I am in on this - as a participant in the Give One Get One program. I think it is a worthy cause and a valiant plan (with a host of problems to be sure). And a 3 year old in Bergenfield likes to carry around her bright green laptop which we hope is indestructible.

'One Laptop' a hit in Peruvian village

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) -- Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can

benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

A group of children have breakfast at a public dining room reading information on their laptop in Peru.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops -- people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books -- can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits.

At night, they're dozing off in front of them -- if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.

Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each. more ...