[Olpc-open] lap top for a child

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 6:57 AM, enawgaw mehari <emehari at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Edward,
> How can I access the lap top for a child project. We have girls AIDS orphans
> boarding school and love to get some laptops for them.
> please advise,

* How many children do you have, and how many laptops do you want?

* How will the purchase be funded?

* Which languages do you need?

* Do you have materials on preventing and treating AIDS in those languages?

You can find a few individual XOs for sale on Ebay, but I know of no
way to get enough for a class. The GiveMany program,
http://laptopfoundation.org/participate/givemany.shtml, is incoherent
and in my experience is impossible to deal with. I find that I don't
believe anything that Brightstar tells me about the program, because
they have changed their terms radically with no announcement, and
because of their incompetence in the GiveOneGetOne program. At first
it was cash in advance with delivery in 90 days. Then, without
warning, it became

* Cash in advance
* A delivery date will be provided in 60 days
* Delivery can be any time in the next nine (9) months.

I have been told that GiveMany is to be redesigned, but until that
happens, there seems to be nothing we can do. I don't think it can
happen before we get a new CEO, about which we have heard nothing.

I hope that Mary Lou Jepsen's $75 laptop will be sold in a normal
manner starting sometime in 2009, but nothing is known about it
publicly.

Does your school have any computers? You can run Sugar on them if so.
It isn't the same as laptops that share on the mesh network and that
the children can take home, but it is better than nothing. I and
others would be delighted to help you set up what you can. Children
can still share over Ethernet or WiFi.

We need your voice and many others on the OLPC-Open and
OLPC-Grassroots mailing lists. You can join at
http://lists.laptop.org/. Please tell your friends that their voices
will help us to help them. As we say in English, "The squeaky wheel
gets the grease." Let us hear from your orphan girls, also. They have
a world to discover, and much of it is directly available to them. We
can help you show them how to do a lot of it without computers, as
long as we have even one e-mail channel between us.

> With best regards,
>
> Enawgaw

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay