Stones instead of Bread?

Recently this headline caught my attention: “A LOW-COST LAPTOP FOR EVERY CHILD - Effort to link world’s rural poor to Internet with $100 computers gets boost from U.N.” Shivers went through me. Over the years, my wife and I have traveled to more than two dozen Third World countries and have seen children struggling with unbelievable obstacles—hunger, disease, and countless other ills. Amazingly, these children were happy with the little they had. Certainly they needed help—but not low-cost laptops, as trumpeted by the headline I referred to above. That would be like giving stones to someone asking for bread.

- Johann Christoph Arnold