English Audio Request

Now a law graduate, Sam worked with the tribal reconciliation courts hearing allegations of genocidal acts. He worked too with the ministry of education before joining One Laptop Per Child. Like David Cavallo, he is a firm believer in what the XO can do, in particular its promise for opening up a society that was once lethally closed. Sam pauses for a moment and continues passionately: "You know the problem with having a poor education is that you are not given the faculties to cross-check information, not given access to information. Our society, before the genocide, was not open. Now I can go on the internet. I can check what I am being told. I can make my own analysis.
"I remember a text that I learned at school. It said you go to school to learn how to learn. If you can enable people in society… with computers… you release the human potential. You can go beyond."
We pull up outside the church turned memorial and enter among pews heaped with the clothing of the long-ago slaughtered. The building's roof is a starscape of punctured holes left 15 years ago by grenade fragments that still let in the light. A carpet of clothes recovered from bodies thrown in the latrines lies like a frozen flow of lava.
Leaving the nave, with its still bloodstained altar cloth, we descend into a cool cellar where skulls and long leg bones are arranged neatly on shelves, the former like cantaloupes on a grocer's shelf. Except that on the pale cranial plates there are slashes made by machetes.
"Some of these were children. They wanted to be footballers. To go into space. Their dreams were ended here. They are now… just like a kind of teaching aid." Sam says the last words bitterly.
Arriving with Cavallo back at the Groupe Scholaire Kagugu, I find the children working on their projects. A teacher calls a handful to the front to show what they have done. They display presentations on protecting the environment, the forest eco-system, health. Afterwards a few sit down and let me see what they have been working on. There are projects about the space shuttle with downloaded pictures of a launch, simple animations and slide shows. Impressive graphics too, given how little experience they have had using the machines.