[OLPC Brasil] OLPC XO 1.5 machines for former street children in Brazil

[Michael Voigt]

Dear members of OLPC Brasil,

First of all: please excuse I am writing in English but I do not speak Portuguese. 

Currently, I am travelling through Brazil with two friends. During our jorney, we visited the village on the island Itamarcá (near Recife) of "O Pequeno Nazareno" [1], a project for street children in Brazil. One of my two friends worked for three weeks in the village in Fortaleza. As of now, the project maintains two farms---one on the island Itamarcá, the other one near Fortaleza. Such a village provides a new home for about 35 former street children. For more information about the project please visit its website [1].

I believe that a quality education is a key aspect in providing the former street children with a chance for a better future; and in an information society like ours access to computers and the internet is an important part of education. But Chiquinho, the co-leader of the Itamarcá village, told us about the bad IT infrastructure of the project: At the moment, the village on Itamaracá has only one computer for the children and the adults. As a big fan of Free Software and the OLPC project---I own a Give One Get One XO 1 machine myself---I therefore think that suppling the children of the Nazareno villages with OLPC XO 1.5 machines could help to improve the education quality of the children.

For this reason, I would like to inquire whether it would be possible for OLPC Brasil---maybe in cooperation with OLPC Germany e.V.---to supply both or one of the farms with XO 1.5 laptops. If financing is a problem I think it should be possible to find financial contributors for this purpose. I already mailed to the international OLPC headquaters (laptop.org), but they told me that they do not sell OLPC XO machines in small quantities directly.

As an idea for a much larger scale project we could think of providing a larger network of similar projects with OLPC laptops that are payed by the brazilian government. A nation-wide networking initiative called "Criança naõ é de Rua" [2] of organisations for street children has already been launched.

Kind regards,
Michael Voigt
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[1] http://nazareno.de/br/
[2] http://www.criancanaoederua.org.br/
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