A few years ago, at the request of the people of the Kaffa rainforest region in Ethiopia (the original home of the coffee bean), we built a middle school in a beautiful, remote village called Muti.  Muti is an agricultural area.  The people of Muti live in mud huts with thatched or tin roofs.  There is no electricity infrastructure in this area.  Education is highly valued but difficult to access.   Muti has an active elementary school.  With no middle school, students generally ended their education at 6th grade, or they moved away from home to stay with relatives elsewhere to attend a middle school.  

We provided the materials and professional labor to build the school.  As you can see in the photos below, the students harvested rock from the river bottom for the school's floor, and everyone in the community helped to build walls.  Parents built the desks and the Ethiopian government provided salaried teachers, a principal, and textbooks for the teachers.   We shipped about 2000 pounds of reference and reading books for a small school library.  Getting those heavy boxes of books to Ethiopia via Djibouti, through customs, transported to Chiri, and carried by hand 10km on the footpath to Muti was a trip.  I started thinking seriously about e-books.  

After evaluating many ebook readers, I decided to go with the One Laptop Per Child XO computers.  They are far more than ebook readers -- they are general purpose computers that run an open source operating system and applications.  The hardware and software also support ebooks.  We prepared the computers in Denver, trained our volunteers, and sent two teams to Ethiopia in 2009.

 In July 2009, our LLR team held a series of training sessions for the Muti middle school teachers and staff, introducing the OLPC XO laptop and working with the staff on curriculum integration.  In November 2009, with kind cargo-shipping assistance from our colleagues at FedEx, our team setup 130 OLPC XO laptops at the Muti middle school.   The laptops have e-book/ reference information installed on memory cards -- select Wikipedia content, public domain math and science content, and (with approval from the Ethiopia government) PDFs of the government-issued school textbooks previously available only to the teachers.  Students at the middle school can check out a laptop to take home in a backpack provided by our generous colleagues at Eagle Creek.  And, they can recharge batteries while at home using a flexible solar panel and a unique single-battery charger made by our colleagues at RCal Products.  

We originally selected flexible solar panels so that the students could easily recharge batteries when they take the XO computers home.  We also used the flexible solar panels to construct a temporary centralized recharging station at the school.  Later, we worked with a small renewable energy company from Addis Ababa to install rigid PV solar panels and a battery array at the school for a centralized recharging station.  

The current middle school students, future middle school students, parents, teachers, and staff are all excited about the educational opportunities that the OLPC XO computers provide in Muti.  Generations ago, Kaffa shared the coffee bean with the world.  In the next generations, these educated young people from Kaffa may continue to bless the world by sharing their talents in renewable energy, engineering, medical science, agriculture, arts, music, and more!