[geeks] $100 One Laptop Per Child - grist for the mill

[Mike Meredith]

On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 09:43:54 -0800, William Kirkland wrote:
> The difficulty here is that those people have more basic needs which  
> must be addressed before providing inexpensive laptops becomes useful.

I think you're possibly making the same mistake that Dvorak makes. It's
easy to assume that 'all those people' just need food. As most are
dependant on subsistence farming, most can actually feed themselves
(perhaps not well) for much of the time. It's only during the bad years
that we get the kind of atrocious TV pictures we're so familiar with; in
the worst areas the bad years become nearly constant because of bad
governments.

Interestingly, the UN when going into a disaster area will always
attempt to source food supplies locally. They are successful much of the
time.

It would be interesting to know what 'all those people' would think
themselves ... one story is hardly overwhelming evidence but is never
the less interesting. This one is from a BBC mini-documentary and I
haven't the faintest idea of what part of Africa it's from, but ...

It's about a woman who was widowed with three young children to feed,
who almost starved before she was given a micro-loan to help her set
herself up as a sort of shop-keeper in her village. She admitted things
were precarious and her family would not infrequently go hungry for one,
two or even three days.

But she was a big believer in education, wanting her children to be
educated and escape the subsistence economy and possibly become
politicians to sort out the corruption in her country.

It was quite obvious that she would sell her soul to give her children
an OLTP to give them the textbooks she could probably never afford to
buy.

(Not that the OLTP was mentioned at any time during the report)

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  'I find film very seductive ... like a woman my parents would not like
   me to date. She's expensive, inconvenient, and you really can't
   know you'll get what you want. But you'll be certain you'll want a
   cigarette before the night is out.