How I welcomed an immigrant family with a Linux laptop

So, not a lot of money, and, with two sons to support, plenty of higher priorities for its use than $50 or better a month for broadband Internet access. (Given the nature of the modern web, dialup is more or less equivalent to nothing at all; mobile Internet is faster, much easier to obtain, and probably cheaper than any local dialup provider you can even still find in 2016.)

I found catholic charities to be best for this (I am not catholic). They work on site, have long tradition and very small overhead.

Find local people in your area. Religious communities are a good place to start, especially if you have any sort of affiliation yourself. There might be refugee focused charities or community groups, PC recycling charities.. Shouldn't be hard to find. Call them. Ask what they need or tell them what you'd like to do.

Other than PCs (and other material things they need), it can be good to just have newly arrived refugees to dinner. It helps to know local people like you personally.

https://www.facebook.com/computersforrefugees

I've been thinking about setting something like this up where I come from in London, UK. A worker at a refugee centre told me that laptops are an extremely helpful tool for refugees so they can communicate with authorities and aid agencies in good time, but that they were out of reach for most. Refugees generally have stupidphones because they're cheap and easy to get a hold of, but not laptops.

Anyone interested in working together on something like this in London?

[1] https://www.givedirectly.org/ [2] http://www.givewell.org/

As an aside, the costs are actually representative of the treatment, unlike in the inflated world of American insurance.

The mother told me she was very eager to learn English so that she could find her first job. In Haiti, she was close to finishing her law degree. So, I started thinking about what I could do to help speed her towards that goal.

Maybe you have heard of the Digital Divide.

"Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime."

There is no such thing as a selfless good deed, and a lot of philanthropists want people to know how good they are. But when selfless and selfish ambition align, as in the case of charity, society itself benefits. That's a good thing.

If a charity is legitimately disinterested in being recognized you never would have heard of it. This getting popular could help the concept spread.

> Second, the article seems to reinforce the condescending/patronizing attitude Americans often have toward immigrants when they're not busy hating them. The attitude consists in thinking that immigrants come from backward, horrible, uncivilized places and that the American is the noble, better educated, civilized, great benefactor.

Which exact text in the article gave you that impression? I feel like I am pretty sensitive to such tones but I didn't pick up any of that.

> Third, if you're paying $60 for a laptop, just pay for it yourself. Getting people to chip in for a 10 year old, $60 brick just looks really cheap. It's not much of a sacrifice, guy.

You too could chip in. As you yourself said, it isn't much of a sacrifice, so why don't you?

This really, really depends on how much you make. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem for us, but I know many people who can't afford to drop $60 on something like that out of the blue.

Edited to add:

> the point of helping others which is not self-glorification, but the death of ego

Is it? I thought the point of helping others was to help, rather than to polish one's own Zen. More fool I, no doubt.

This makes me think you haven't traveled all that much. Places like this actually exist.

And the Linux market would have benefited from that, which fosters a growing community on the platform.