Early adopters: Children carry XOs at the Institución Educativa Apóstol Santiago in Arahuay, Peru, where almost 50 kids have being using prototype laptops since last summer. They are at the vanguard of the world’s largest deployment of OLPC computers--to Peru’s most remote primary schools. Credit: Ana Cecilia Gonzales-Vigil/WPN

A fleeting roadside scene in Lima, Peru, sticks in my mind. A very little girl, perhaps four, stood on a narrow traffic island bisecting a congested thoroughfare amid choking dust, soot, and fumes. With the girl was a woman I took to be her mother. The mother, a street peddler, was unpacking a crate full of something. (I couldn't see what, but other peddlers offered avocados, toilet paper, and toy rats.) Around them roared 1970s-era buses and battered vehicles, passing below concrete habitations creeping up dismal, denuded hillsides in one of the city's vast slums. The child was energetically scooping up plastic bags for her mother, her shaggy brown hair flopping forward. Not far away, an old woman picked through a pile of smoldering refuse. Against the squalid tableau, the girl was tidying her little corner of Lima as she spent her morning helping Mom at work.

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