OLPC XO -2

Ambitious. Innovative. Cool.

And when I say cool, I mean:

Easier access to information.

Ease of text book distribution.

Ease of program learning for the future.

Ease of education.

Ease of mental expansion; art, music, creation/creativity.

The reason I'm writing about this in this journal? I am fed. the fuck. up. with people who see the OLPC as it stands and the company's dream for the future and start talking about how what 'those countries really need is water filters and food'.

You're wrong.

You're. so. fucking. wrong.

Likely cause quite a few of you making that statement associate 'those countries' with the ads that come on tv that talk about for 50 cents a day, you could feed a starving child.

I grew up in a third world country. We know to boil water to drink. And before you talk about the Caribbean being different somehow, I'll state that I grew up on the side of a mountain in the middle of a jungle. I drank rain water, my grandmother's home was a homestead and as a little girl I read books by kerosene lantern.

So please, shut the fuck up.

Education is EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING.

And in this day and age to not have general computer skills is a set back. Heck I've experienced that set back. Not from lack of general computer skills, but because I went to a school, right here in the US, that couldn't afford some of the necessities of the AP Biology program.

I got to college and I'd never used Quattro, far less on a laptop. I didn't know what it was for. I panicked. That panic changed my entire perspective on the class. All of a sudden I was listing everything I didn't know instead of what I did.

Now imagine that not for a single class in college. But that you've made it out of your village to university level, or you've made it out of your village and now you need to get a job. But the jobs that aren't grunt, physical labour, regardless of your smarts, require you to know things like the Windows Operating System, spreadsheets and email and wireless connectivity; because the jobs that pay are all with banks, broadcasting, or with companies that are outsourcing to your nation of residence.

What then?

There has been too much giving of fish to countries that instead need to be taught and learn how to fish in this new millennium. And if you don't know what I'm referring to, will you be upset if I say you're not well read? Will you be frustrated?

Pause a second and imagine feeling that way about something that you currently think of as basic, but that's really not for others.

I'm not saying that infrastructure is a bad thing. I'm not saying that there aren't places that could use help with infrastructure. How that help is given, however, is an entry for another time - because I have issues with the lack of respect for cultural norms of various areas, as if progress means doing things the white American or British or European way.

But infrastructure is not just about housing and water and food. It's about the ability of a community to fend for itself; police itself, protect itself, provide for itself. Giving them only food and water makes them dependent there after.

You don't just feed and cloth a child, you educate them. Why should a county rich with it's own history, currently poor because of the politics of a conquering and colonializing Europe - which tore tribes and families and the political system then in place apart, be treated as less than a child?

For my own self, the thought of children and adults in those countries, finding their way into the 21st Century; to create and enrich, perhaps in art and literature - well that just makes my world better.

Who knows what SF writers and artists may be handed tools meant for both education and play.

I can't wait to see and read what they have to say.