By Michele Jolin
In the top floor of the Loreto Day School in bustling central Calcutta, young girls in white uniforms with straight blue ties are scattered across the room, sitting cross-legged on the cement floor in front of groups of barefooted boys and girls. The uniformed girls patiently draw on hand-held chalkboards, reset the pieces of learning games and read from storybooks, while the barefoot children listen and play and screech and learn. The uniformed students, mostly middle- and upper-class children from around Calcutta, are teaching reading, mathematics, problem solving, and analytic skills to these children, whose only home is the nearby train platform or the pavement outside the walls of the Loreto school. The uniformed students are designated the "teachers," but they are learning as much as their young pupils – learning important leadership, organization, and presentation skills and learning about the lives and struggles of those living in the community around them.
Across the world, in a favela community center on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, computer screens light the faces of children who are playing number games, crafting birthday cards and drafting strategies to address community needs. The Committee for Computer Science Democratization (CDI) has provided these and other poor children in Brazil with access to computers in the hope that this technological link will better
integrate these young people into society and foster greater participation in Brazil's political and economic life.
