Earlier today, Lee, one of two official brothers of NewMexiKen, and known on these pages primarily as SnoLepard, posted a comment that I thought was ill-considered. It wasn’t that anything was particularly wrong with what was written, it just seemed to me that what he wrote did not fit with the positive nature of the original entry, which was announcing the “hope to bring every child in the world a computer.”
I deleted the comment and sent my brother an email explaining what I had done and why. My action — deleting the comment — troubled me when I thought about it during the day, though.
Fortunately, Lee has replied:
Every day, more than 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes—one child every five seconds. Every day about 3000 children in Africa die from malaria. A new UNICEF report shows that more than half the world’s children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty, war and HIV/AIDS.
There are about 1.8 billion people below the age of 15 in the world today. About 83% live in poverty. That’s about a billion and a half poor children world-wide. At $100 per computer that comes to $150 billion. …
Even the city of Portland is still arguing about how to make its downtown wireless. In Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, only one person in 200 has access to the Internet. Believe me, the Internet is not as ubiquitous worldwide as it is in developed countries. Only cities and large towns have it and even Internet cafes are beyond the price range of the vast majority of people.
Again I say, it is a tender notion but far from being practical. I appreciate the need for education, but I’d say people who are without food, potable water, medical care and proper shelter have more pressing needs and that the money will be better spent taking care of those problems first.
Touche, NewMexiKen.
Earlier today, when I read about MIT’s project to create an inexpensive laptop that you could recharge with a crank, and connect to the Internet by piggybacking off a nearby wireless system, I must admit that I, too, wondered where the children in remote areas such as rural Africa or the “hollers” of Appalachia were supposed to find those wireless connections. And, while I agree with SnoLepard that food and water are certainly higher priorities, I also think it’s a noble ambition to want to provide computers and Internet access to whomever desires those privileges. I’m sure there are children around the world who would be thrilled at the opportunity to own a computer–many of them right here in America. At the rate technology is advancing, who knows what possibilities the future holds–before long, maybe even “piggybacking” will be unnecessary, especially if the computer geeks at MIT keep at it.
Yes, eradicating poverty should be a top priority, but not our only one. And we should always keep in mind that one of the most promising ways out of poverty is, indeed, education.