Reply #4: Well, I see it somewhat differently. [View All]

I've heard so many of these glowing blurbs about installing some device for 50 or 60 or 1000 people somewhere some how. Mostly though, it comes from well off self-congratulatory groups trying to assauge the guilt of doing very little.

There are 700 million people in Africa. The soil is depleted, the rains don't come and Westerners, since the 19th century, beginning with Livingston and Stanley - another team of self congratulatory apologists - still go off trying to redeem themselves by pretending to care about Africa.

I will be that the do-gooders consumed more energy flying themselves in for photographs and running links to their good deeds than the Africans themselves will see from this scheme.

The batteries ultimately will rot somewhere, and probably poison some future African.

And somewhere, someone will mutter like Kurtz on his deathbed: "The horror. The horror."