Donate Laptops and Books for Kids!

We are looking for donations of new or used thumb drives (USB flash drives) of sizes 1Gb and up. These flash drives will be distributed to each child so that they can have their own, portable computer via the Sugar on a Stick SoaS) project.

We are also looking for donations of laptops and books to the local public primary and middle school’s new library. The school has two teachers and two hundred students. The upkeep of buildings, teachers, books and the new library are provided by donations and volunteers. Now that a library has been built, we have a safe place to put a computer and volunteers that will be able to assist in using it. We need a laptop that can be easily stored away when the library is closed. We also need it to have a CDROM drive, a PII 300Mhz processor or faster, at least 64MB memory, a video card with at least 4MB memory, and a built in network card with PXE so that our Spanish learning software can be installed. If you have questions about any of these requirements (don’t worry, most people don’t know what PXE is :), please let us know the make and model and we can check it out for you. If we can’t use it for the local school, we are also donating laptops to college bound seniors that have earned a 3.5 GPA or higher. Dean plans on taking responsibility for the upkeep of the school computers and training one of the students to fix it and care for it.

If you have this type of laptop or know someone who is willing to donate one, we would like it if you could bring it down with you. We are happy to pay for any extra baggage fees you may be charged by Sansa Airlines. We are so sorry that we will not be able to give you a receipt of donation for tax deductions (we do not have a U.S. charity set up for doing that). However, if you do decide to donate and deal with the hassle of lugging it down here, you will be giving these kids possibly their first and only access to new technology that can give them more opportunity in their lives.

We are also looking for book donations to the library. We especially need books for kindergarten through second grade in Spanish. We can also use books for kindergarten through sixth grade in both Spanish and English.

Please, in no way feel any obligation to bring anything. The most important thing is that you bring yourself and be ready for a lot of fun in the tropics!