Peruvian children in remote village get small laptops from government program

This is a narrated slide show:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0606_olpc_peru/index_01.htm

One Laptop Meets Big Business
The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child



Peruvian student Justo Miguel Común is in the fifth grade. He got his XO laptop in late April. Jeffery Salter/Redux

by Steve Hamm and Geri Smith

One by one, the children ran into the school yard, lining up in a grassy field next to a low-slung building of classrooms topped by a rusty steel roof. Most of these children in Luquia, a tiny, impoverished town 13,200 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, wore ragged navy-blue uniforms, and many had not bathed in days. Their small adobe homes have dirt floors, no running water, and no bathrooms. They share sleeping space with dozens of squeaking guinea pigs, which scamper underfoot before becoming the family's rare meal of meat. The children, then, were understandably giddy with excitement in May as principal Pedro Santana handed them the most valuable thing they had ever owned: a small green-and-white laptop computer.

These children are among the first in Peru to receive laptops from a trove of 140,000 the government plans to distribute to poor rural students this year in a bold bid to revolutionize the country's dismal educational system. Yet even as the students enjoyed one of the biggest thrills of their lives, the organization behind the computers, One Laptop per Child, was in danger of cracking.

The outfit begun by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte had been thrown into turmoil by the stress of trying to achieve the audacious goal of transforming learning by supplying millions of the world's poor children with laptops. Six weeks earlier, OLPC President Walter Bender, who helped launch the Peruvian deployment, quit abruptly in a dispute with Negroponte, the group's chairman. Software security leader Ivan Krstic left, too. Those departures followed a messy breakup with chip giant Intel (INTC) in January. Cambridge (Mass.)-based OLPC's travails seemed to signal that a group that had promised to rescue the world's poor children from ignorance was itself in need of a lifeline.

The fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the group has promoted have met resistance in the marketplace, government bureaucracies, and classrooms. That Negroponte and his colleagues took on way more tasks than they could handle only complicates the situation further.

More:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_24/b4088048125608.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5

Music, one song, five YouTubes:

Condor Pasa - Espíritu Andino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpJkDZ9g9z4&feature=related

Condor Pasa- Simon & Garfunkel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6i8HHrz2BI
(beautiful song, poorly chosen, randomly picked, apparently, photos which
seem to have very little to do with the song, itself. Odd! If you haven't
heard this song, you just may like it.)

Two men playing instruments:
El Condor Pasa - Heritage Days
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTPE4z38gYo

Quena El Cóndor pasa - Raúl Olarte
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRvqxuqadQ&NR=1

Condor Pasa es boliviano (Savia Andina-Bolivia)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG5G7_CMOls&feature=related



Savia Andina-Bolivia

BZN - El Condor Pasa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1l5eNOlOYY

Could anyone sound worse?

You'd better believe it!
El Condor Pasa Version of Simon and Garfunkel Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTWBiMIqbgs

Jesus H. Christ

El Condor Pasa on zampoñas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kIZQAeHRNY&feature=related
(This one will send you into shock.)

AGUA MARINA - EL CONDOR PASA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i06RLGIuq8I&feature=related
Peruvian brothers' group from Seschura, Peru, near the ocean
Their family name is "Querevalú Quiroga."

Agua Marina dance time, some enthusiastic butt work, "El Condor Pasa"
Agua Marina - El Condor Pasa (www.monsefuradio.com)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwCxJKwNFnw&feature=related
(That mystical quality comes right through, doesn't it? Well, doesn't it?)

El Condor Pasa (vocal)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLuB3Mrzb9s&feature=related

On edit, adding:
Placido Domingo sings El cóndor pasa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmOKsDb3AY&NR=1

electricity in their homes.

The evangelistic fervor of people like the ones pushing the project sounds as if they think they can change the world through giving everyone a laptop. Suddenly the children find meaning in their lives, they want to be someone when they grow up, they start to believe in themselves! Quite a tall order.