OLPC:News

It's ridiculous! I live in africa and the last thing we need are PCs. Children here need food, water, medication, clothes- they need food so they wont die of hunger, get it?? A laptop is useless, and by the way, 100USD is too expensive for somenone who has no money to eat on.

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Answer,

as you see, dear african (btw: are you relly?), your message here reached my bedroom in Italy today thanks to a pc (maybe a really really cheap one), insn't?

--87.4.183.151 06:04, 17 March 2006 (EST) Francesco R. - Castelfranco Veneto - Italy

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Another Answer:

if the last thing you need in africa are PCs, will africa ever start needing them? Children need food, water, medication, etc. - this is true and the most important right now, but that is by far not the only important thing for the african future! Simply providing food, water, medication, etc. does never cure the underlying reasons for their lack. If we strive to provide only the basics it might help a bit immediately but will not sustain for too long... it tends to make things rather worse in the long run - it only deepens economic dependency. Of course that does not mean we should stop providing the basics though. But if you ask for limiting help to the basic priorities, you could therefore just as well ask for stopping all the help... sad but true. Africa needs all help it can get and on all levels to become independent, free and strong!

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Yet another answer: Empowerment and Self Help

Africa was colonialized as were many other areas of the world such as Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, ...Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. as well in more recent times Hungary, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria etc by the USSR. (Even the USA by England ..) Now that Africa is no longer colonialized and there is no "apertheid" what prevents its free nations from being on the road to self-sufficiency? That is a critical question every African must ask - and must demand creative and committed answers from its leaders.

Seems that without meaningful education and a feeling of empowerment by people the only African hope is await CARE packages from more dynamic and successful continents. That is a sad hope for the African continent. An initiative like OLPC can't solve Africa's chronic health and food problems. For that there are organizations like the UN, and even that is not the solution. Africa's, and any continent's and nation's, only real hope and escape from dire circumstances is self-help and forming local helping communities based on a strong sense of kinship. If these are missing there is no real hope.

Only Africans can help Africans. Others can apply band aid solutions.

OLPC can plan valuable seeds whose fruit will ripen maybe after a decade or more. Sometimes there are no quick fix solutions and other quick fixes tend to make problems worse.

L Pfeffer March 18, 2006

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The OLPC project is acting (in my mind) in a way that will free the emergency needs of Africa and similar in the long-terms. It is a long-term GREAT project. Instruction: 100$ to grant ACCESS, communication, and unlimited BOOKS. Future employment: open source software and culture is the emerging countries freedom. As you teach people to act the collaborative way, as you teach them they can do the same things investing on their learning curve and not in the major softwarehouse products, they will naver be "computer slaves". This project was "saved" from having an OS-X based OS, and hardly attatched from Microsoft.

But... the need will be to prevent family from selling the laptops to feed themself!!!

Please, SELL these PCs in the first world, $200 each. With the earned money finance the project. I'd buy it!

Luca Vascon, Venice, Italy. March 18, 2006