Sam Varghese
Sunday, 09 August 2009 07:32
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Srikhanta's vocabulary is laced with buzzwords but to his credit he stops and explains every single one of them each time I raise a query. He has the patience of an ox and will probably need more than that if he is to come out of the experience with OLPC as anything other than a hardened cynic.
A double-degree holder with a background as an internal auditor, he is an intelligent individual who is trying to do good. That's true of many who venture into organisations like this.
But I digress. I ask Srikhanta why the two people who were the public face of OLPC Australia, Jeff Waugh and his wife Pia, were evasive whenever asked questions about the project. He makes a reference to legacy IT systems and indicates that this is a new era.
My queries about the deployment of laptops in
Niue (corrected) brings forth the answer that this is the responsibility of OLPC Oceania.
According to the parent organisation,
Niue (corrected) is the first country to achieve 100 percent XO (the name of the laptop) saturation.
(Once again, Pia Waugh was
full of talk about the
Niue (corrected) operation but then disappeared in April this year to follow more earthy goals as a political hack in Canberra.)
Srikhanta has no knowledge of the
Niue (corrected) operation and offers to put me in touch with those responsible.
I ask him why his organisation is experimenting in remote communities where Aboriginal kids are the majority. When I make reference to the fact that Britain tested nuclear weapons in remote areas where only Aborigines lived and draw a parallel with OLPC, he is offended.
He responds that this is because they want to achieve saturation in terms of laptop distribution in an entire community and this is not possible in metropolitan suburbs due to the numbers involved. He adds that there are plenty of non-Aboriginal children in the project's focus areas.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is now involved with the project ("they offer significant financial support"), and half a million dollars has come from an anonymous donor. Srikhanta says he cannot tell me the identity of the donor.
I ask him how much he is paid. He says he will have to consult the board before such details are revealed. I tell him that I'm making the query because the public often confuses not-for-profit organisations with charities; in the former case one can even be paid a million dollars, all it means is that the organisation does not generate a profit.
In charities, there is frequently a shortage of funds and those who work there have to often make do with less than what they were promised.
