Peter
Dalglish is the founder of Street Kids International, and is a
leading authority on working children, street children, and
war-affected children. After graduating from Stanford and Dalhousie
Law School, Peter Dalglish organized an airlift of food and medical
supplies from Canada to the starving African nation. His encounter
with emaciated and destitute refugees seared him for life. Peter
Dalglish returned to Canada from Ethiopia and informed the senior
partners of his law firm that he was giving up the profession to
pursue a career alongside some of the world’s poorest children. In an
isolated desert region along the Sudan’s border with Chad, Peter
Dalglish organized humanitarian relief for women and children
displaced by drought and famine. In Khartoum in 1986, Peter Dalglish
began the Sudan’s first technical training school for street
children, funded by Bob Geldof of Band Aid. Pickpockets, petty
thieves and housebreakers were transformed into carpenters, welders
and electricians; the graduates were hired by local businesses.

In
May, 1986 Peter Dalglish set up a bicycle courier service run
entirely by street children in Khartoum. The kids delivered mail and
newspapers to offices that they once had broken into; along the way
they learned the importance of discipline and hard work. In
recognition of his efforts on behalf of destitute African children,
in 1988 Peter Dalglish was selected by Junior Chamber International
as one of the ten outstanding young people of the world.

Inspired
by the tenacity and ingenuity of kids society had written off, Peter
Dalglish returned to Canada in 1987 to found Street Kids
International. Armed with $200, a borrowed office and an American
Express card, he launched an agency that has become a global leader
in designing creative self-help projects for poor, urban children.
Between 1988 and 1990 Street Kids International developed Karate
Kids, an animated film
about HIV prevention; today the cartoon is in distribution in 25
languages and in over 100 countries, making it one of the largest
initiatives for street children anywhere in the world. On account of
the success of Karate
Kids, in 1994 Street
Kids International received the coveted Peter F. Drucker Award for
Non-Profit Innovation.

In
1994, Peter Dalglish was appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
as the first director of Youth Service Canada, the Government of
Canada’s civilian youth corps. In 2002 Peter Dalglish was appointed
as the Chief Technical Adviser for the UN’s child labour program in
Nepal. Peter currently serves as the Executive Director of the South
Asia Children’s Fund, which supports high- quality education for profoundly disadvantaged children in the region. Every Wednesday in
Kathmandu Peter teaches a class on leadership skills at a school for
children of Tibetan origin; over the last four years fourteen members
of the class, including ten girls, have won scholarships to study
overseas. Peter is a founding board Member of the Board of Directors
of Ashoka Canada, and is the recipient of the Fellowship of Man
Award, and the Dalhousie Law School Weldon Award for Public Service.

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[img_assist|nid=85|title=|desc=Rajeev with his two-year-old son Kaustuv|link=node|align=right|width=386|height=360]Rajeev manages OLE Nepal’s relations with the government of Nepal. More specifically, he is charge of developing the capacity of the Nepali government to implement the One Laptop Per Child project in Nepal.

Rajeev has managed projects in sectors such as education, governance reforms, and social inclusion for government of Nepal on behalf of multilateral and bilateral agencies operating in Nepal.

Rajeev cites his two-year-old son as his primary motivation for joining OLE Nepal.

"My son Kaustuv will start Grade One in four years. I want to make sure that he and his classmates get the best possible education. That’s why I am working on this initiative."

He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Suffolk University in Boston, MA and an MBA from Johnson and Wales University in Rhode Island, USA.

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Meet Santosh, he is an integral part of OLE-Nepal although he is not a member of our ‘Content Development Team’. Observing him playing and learning on the laptop helps us with planning of the future learning activities.

Seven-year-old Santosh is the most special one from among all the children that come to our lab to play because he had never used a computer before and he can keep doing the same activity for hours without getting bored; 5 hours is his record although he is usually on it for upto an hour or so most of the time. He is also special because he has been completely deaf from birth. He presents us with the additional challenge of developing activities for children with impairments.

Santosh with his father Raju

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Now that we’ve created our first demo it’s time to hammer out a really good way of working. Some of our most important goals are:

• Create learning activities individually. We’re a team of developers and we each need to create and modify activities (Squeak "projects") using our own computers. We want people in other countries to be able to do this too, open-source style.
• Distribute the learning activities as a complete integrated package for the XO.
• Distribute the learning activities individually on the web too. We want everybody to run our activities using the Squeakland browser plugin.

We’ve prepared the demo in a "monolithic" way: there’s a single Squeak image that contains all the code, sound clips, images, and Projects that make up our work so far. We’ve prepared this using a single computer and we distribute it as a single huge (54MB) image file.

So now we want to split this into stand-alone project files that we can create, maintain, and distribute by themselves. We’ll need to export the projects with the right code (our OLE package), the right sound clips, the rights fonts, etc. Tips welcome!

In other news I’ve spent a day or so rewriting activity code from Smalltalk into drag’n'drop Etoys scripts and the results have been excellent! More on that later.

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