The Gift of World Wide Web

Posted by Cynical Sarah on September 2, 2007

Last year, one of the gifts my husband gave me for Christmas was a donation in my name to World Vision, a charitable organization that helps feed needy children around the world.

I’m not sure how much was donated in my name, but it was enough to send two hens and a rooster to a needy family. Which, if you didn’t know, can produce around 150 eggs per year, which could mean more chickens for the family or eggs for food, or a little extra income.

Helper Troy knows I like to make donations once in a while, and it was a much better gift than one more thing we’d be stuck trying to find room for in our condo.

It also seemed like a really useful thing to give someone as long as you’re going to be making a donation of some sort anyway. I’m sure we all know the saying, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he can eat forever. Even though we gave chickens, they can be used to continue to produce and provide for the family.

This year’s trend for holiday donating, or “ethical giving” as one news article is calling it, is cheap laptops through One Laptop Per Child.

You may have heard about the program a while back. The group found a way to create these $100 laptops that they wanted to give to children in developing countries.

It kind of falls along the same lines as the “No Child Left Behind” initiative in the U.S. These children will get technology that will help them stay on a more level playing field with the rest of the world.

Of course, we’ve all seen how No Child Left Behind has really turned out for Americans. There aren’t many teachers in the nation who are fans of the program, and similarly, though many developing nations were interested in the One Laptop Per Child organization, none of them have actually made any orders for the laptops.

“I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written – it has been a disappointment,” said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the not-for-profit project, in a Time Online article.

It doesn’t help that the laptops ended up costing more than $100 when all was said and one, and it has seen some criticism from leading electronics producers.

So now the organization is appealing to the general, hopefully generous public.

During the One Laptop Per Child’s Give One, Get One promotion, people can spend $399 and receive two laptops, one for themselves and one donated to a child in a developing country.

It’s a little sad that they’ve had to appeal to a person’s need to get something out of a deal in order to get them to do something charitable for someone. Not that I’m certain it can be called charitable if you’re getting something out of it as well.

But what are the children of Rwanda, Haiti, Afghanistan and Cambodia really getting out of this program as well? Yes, they’ll be getting a piece of technology they may not have had the opportunity to get otherwise. Even I didn’t get a laptop until just last week, and I live in a “developed” country.

Of course, I also had a desktop computer before that, and the point is that these children will have access to technology they may not get a chance to use otherwise. Learning to use a computer and have access to the Internet gives children a huge advantage these days. Growing up in a third-world country would no longer mean being behind in advanced technology, or being cut off from the rest of the world.

Having a laptop will give them educational tools they didn’t have before, which will help them have a better future, but what will it do for them in the present to help improve their situations?

A few chickens can make an immediate impact on a family. A new laptop – well, it’s really just a fancy toy that can help educate the child using it. Like any other toy, no matter how useful it is, I picture it being tossed aside at some point and forgotten, especially since the units are meant for children ages 7 to 11 and aren’t all that sophisticated to grow and evolve with the child.

Perhaps the people from Microsoft and Pentium are right in calling them “electronic gadgets” rather than real laptops. Of course, both are speaking a bit out of jealousy as well since the creators of the laptops chose to go with a Linux operating system and an alternative to the Pentium chips.

Because those two things are pretty standard in most computers, it’s hard to see the new laptops as anything other than a gadget, sort of like the children’s “laptops” you can buy at Toys R Us.

- Sarah L. Polson

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