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They need sunshine, fresh air, and clean water. They need good teachers and doctors. They need books and medical supplies and a world where they don't have to w

They need sunshine, fresh air, and clean water. They need good teachers and doctors. They need books and medical supplies and a world where they don't have to work full time before they reach puberty You seem to be dealing with received wisdom here. From what I've seen, the children targeted by the program have not been in situations reflective of life-threatening destitution, nor is the correlation between poverty and rapist-fathers particularily strong. The vast bulk of charity goes to exactly the sort of things you mention, with Gates and Buffet being the obvious current examples. This kind of charity has generally failed as just giving people food (etc) is a temporary fix of a long-term problem. And so OLPC is trying to improve kids' future productivity. It's a reasonable goal, even if it will probably fail.

pavelludiq 18y ago
Yeah, i agree. Bulgaria isn't as bad as it used to be when i was a kid in the nineties and early 2000-s. I mean we have two new playgrounds where kids can play football near my school, almost everybody can afford a mobile phone and the people living in extreme poverty are allot less than what i remember it the nineties(im born 1990). We need better education. Bulgaria had very good education, but it's declining. The teachers have miserable salaries, the students are not motivated. Basically we need some cool after class activities, because now most of the kids are just getting stoned, because of the boredom. In my home town there used to be a free government funded air modeling club. Kids just learned and had a hobby for after school. Now its private and its too expensive for me. There were allot of stuff like that that either disappeared or got really expensive because of privatization. And the only alternatives are sport and drugs. I see improvements in the sport part. There are allot of programs and stuff, but it's not enough and its not only sport thats important. In school computer education is broken. BROKEN. We all just surf the net or chat or in my case show off my cool little scripts that i made home. So we don't need better anti mafia and anti drugs squads, we need better teachers and more after school activities that are free(or relatively cheap). Of course thats only for the region. In Africa they need doctors and teachers and farm equipment and stuff.

pavelludiq 18y ago

Yeah, i agree. Bulgaria isn't as bad as it used to be when i was a kid in the nineties and early 2000-s. I mean we have two new playgrounds where kids can play football near my school, almost everybody can afford a mobile phone and the people living in extreme poverty are allot less than what i remember it the nineties(im born 1990). We need better education. Bulgaria had very good education, but it's declining. The teachers have miserable salaries, the students are not motivated. Basically we need some cool after class activities, because now most of the kids are just getting stoned, because of the boredom. In my home town there used to be a free government funded air modeling club. Kids just learned and had a hobby for after school. Now its private and its too expensive for me. There were allot of stuff like that that either disappeared or got really expensive because of privatization. And the only alternatives are sport and drugs. I see improvements in the sport part. There are allot of programs and stuff, but it's not enough and its not only sport thats important. In school computer education is broken. BROKEN. We all just surf the net or chat or in my case show off my cool little scripts that i made home. So we don't need better anti mafia and anti drugs squads, we need better teachers and more after school activities that are free(or relatively cheap). Of course thats only for the region. In Africa they need doctors and teachers and farm equipment and stuff.