Slum children go digital in Johannesburg

Although the small green-and-white plastic laptops stand out in the Kliptown squatter camp southwest of Johannesburg, few in the 45,000-person slum realize its educational potential -- except the children. From left, Tando Thandolweu, 8, Thembisile “Puna” Dube, 10, Mbali Mbalenhle, 10, and Noxolo Queen, 8. (Olesia Plokhii photo)

Olesia Plokhii is a Boston-based freelance journalist currently living in Soweto, South Africa.

By Olesia Plokhii

JOHANNESBURG -- With the help of a little green-and-white plastic laptop, two Boston sisters are changing the way a handful of South African slum kids think about their future -- and the world around them.

The Kliptown squatter camp, occupying a small corner of Johannesburg’s Soweto, itself synonymous with slum life, boasts little in the way of basic societal needs: It has obsolete infrastructure, no electricity, unsanitary living conditions, and next to no access to new technology.

In Kliptown, children -- many of them HIV-positive -- sleep on floor mats, eat only one meal a day, use unclean public toilets, play barefoot on dirt littered with shattered glass, and huddle around a fire of burning tires for warmth during crisp winter nights.

It was on a tour of this slum in 2006, as part of a high school group from the Boston area, that Hannah and Julia Weber decided they could make a difference by introducing something that children in the rest of the developed world take for granted.

That something was the durable, affordable, and child-friendly machine known as the XO, a laptop made popular by the Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, an initiative aimed at producing an affordable laptop to train children in developing countries in computer literacy.

The small laptop, which runs on a Linux platform and uses the Sugar operating system, has a retail value of about $180, is water- and damage-resistant, and can function on solar power when used in rural areas that lack basic electricity or money to purchase fuel-powered generators.

Its software is wired with basic scholastic applications such as a word processor, an encyclopedia, a calculator, advanced graphic design and music programs, a built-in mesh network that allows as many as 10 XOs to communicate without an Internet connection, and of course, an Internet browser.

The man who took the Weber sisters on their tour was Thulani Madondo, the 27-year-old director of the Kliptown Youth Program, a two-year-old nonprofit that provides an alternative to life on the streets for more than 300 of the thousands of children and teenagers in the slum, which is home to 45,000 people. Madondo said the women were so confident in the XO that they offered him an all-expense paid trip to the OLPC headquarters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to judge for himself whether the little laptop that could, would -- in Kliptown.

"When we were at the OLPC office, we used applications like video, the mesh network, chat, and the Internet, something which is a challenge to use here in Kliptown,’’ Madondo said, referring to the neglected state the teeming slum still finds itself in more than a century after poor Africans first inhabited the settlement in 1903 and the ANC used its soil as the stage for the Freedom Charter, a document promulgating African freedom during apartheid. "Since Kliptown is still not electrified, I had to go to Internet cafes every time I wanted to use wireless, so after seeing that the XOs could connect to the Net, I knew that there were companies that would sell us Internet bandwidth.”

Hannah and Julia Weber returned to KYP with their father -- a friend of Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the OLPC idea -- in 2008. This time, they brought with them 250 XO laptops, a wireless server, a generator for electricity, solar panels, and monetary donations for initial Internet costs.

And so, while OLPC’s strategy of trying to persuade governments to purchase XOs en masse continued to be contested, the first independent XO pilot project in Africa began.

Upon the laptops’ arrival, Madondo said he felt lucky for the opportunity to teach spelling, grammar, English, and technology skills to children who may never have had the luxury otherwise.

“As a child, it is not your responsibility to look for food; your responsibility is to learn and do all the other things that children are doing all over the world,” he said.

KYP member Mbali Mbalenhle agrees. She said she uses the XO to do homework and talk to her friends.

“I play games and I also write something to my friends, like ‘hi friend, I love u, do you love me,’ and make photos using the camera,” the outgoing 10-year-old said. “I love the XO because the XO helps you do homework,” added Mbalenhle, who admits she never knew what a computer was before the arrival of the XO.

Three years ago, a computer at KYP seemed a distant reality, reserved mostly for privileged white students enrolled in private primary and secondary schools in affluent South African areas like Sandton and Pretoria. Today, with 250 XOs in tow, two Boston sisters and this educational nonprofit in the heart of Kliptown are, if not changing these children’s circumstances, at least broadening their outlook -- not only about the world beyond the chicken-wire borders of their shantytown, but about their own futures.

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