From cnn.com:

 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.

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.

Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through “Give One, Get One,” a U.S.-based promotion ending December 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.

One Laptop Per Child project is spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte and aims to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves with a help of XO Laptop.

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Indeed, a very nice article to read.

In a nutshell, author John C. Dvorak shares his insights how One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte might have missed the train when it comes to solving world hunger.

Apparently, saying anything negative about the OLPC XO-1 computer amounts to heresy in this community. You may as well promote NAMBLA or the KKK. People don’t want to consider the possibility that their well-meaning thoughts are a joke and that a $200 truckload of rice would be of more use than Wi-Fi in the middle of nowhere. There seems to be a notion that the poor in Africa or East Asia are just like the kids in East Palo Alto. Once they get a laptop, there will be no digital divide, will there? People can say, “I did my part!”

It is true that food is more important than a $100 laptop to a starving child. But there is an old saying that goes:

Give man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.

World hunger cannot be solved by merely giving food to the needy. It involves several actions that needs to be done and the OLPC, a project that aims to provide every child in impoverished countries a laptop as an educational aid, is a step in achieving the goal of eradicating poverty. With proper education, people will learn to look after themselves and not to rely on other people to save them.

OLPC is an education project that designs an affordable laptop and educational software and aims to provide children outside of first-world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.

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