In September 2007 a force 5 hurricane named Felix destroyed 70% of a remote Miskito

indigenous community in the north eastern coast of Nicaragua, with more than 2,000 people
either killed or missing. Most of the missing people were fishermen that were caught by surprise
at sea because of lack of adequate warning and communication infrastructure. Miskito Indians
live in primitive, centuries old traditions, highly illiterate, -Miskito language being the prevailing
language-, with little Spanish or English being spoken among them. It takes 24 hours by road
to travel from Managua to Puerto Cabezas, the main fishing town, now being renamed in
Miskito language as Bilwi. Curiously enough, there is a fantastic airport runway, the longest in
the country, courtesy of the CIA, built at the days of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Arriving
by plane is the sensible way to visit this out-post, sort of in the middle of no-where.

Thanks to a Nicaraguan philanthropist,

Roberto Zamora, and of his wife Maria
Josefina Teran, owners of a leading
banking and insurance group called the
LAFISE Bancentro Group, and their
recently created Foundation, the Zamora
Teran Foundation, the life of the 3,000
children of this community, many of them
left orphans because of hurricane Felix, is
changing with a new type of revolution,
different from the ones known to this area With Roberto Zamora & Maria Josefina Teran
of the hemisphere; this time we are talking
about the “Revolution of Hope”.

On March 10, thanks to a gift to the Zamora Teran foundation by the government of Denmark,
3,000 XO laptops out of a total of 6,000 units donated were delivered to 7 schools of the fishing
village with their corresponding connectivity infrastructure, teacher, community and student
training. This ceremony marked the culmination of more than one year of preparation.

All together, the Zamora Teran foundation

has delivered more than 25,000 laptops
financed in great part with their own
money, complemented by donations from
clients, employees and by countries like
Denmark who after experiencing the
prudent, efficient and redeeming
managing of resources entrusted to the
foundation, decided this was indeed a
wise way to give their money away. Lead
by the energetic and highly motivated
president, Maria Josefina Teran, and by a
competent skilled group of young men
and women, this foundation is changing
Nicaragua in ways unheard of until now in this poor and troubled country.
This process started in the early 1985 when, with US$ 75,000 savings, Roberto Zamora,
working in treasury and capital markets at Citibank, saw an opportunity in the new area of “debt
to equity” and sovereign debt and since he could not convince his bosses of entering this field
for the Latin America market, started on his own in the mist of the financial crisis of 1982.
Together with his wife they opened a 400 sq.ft office in then sleepy Brickell Avenue’s quasi
financial district in the heart of Miami. Catering to highly indebted governments and to
Nicaraguan exiles and other Central American families escaping from the turbulent times of
those days, they created what is today an empire of more than US $ 2 billion in assets in
banking, insurance and, with entrepreneurial guts, in the dairy (Parmalat) and meat industries.
Today, they are the largest exporters of dairy and meat products of Nicaragua.

Always conscious about the dilemmas, predicaments and challenges presented to the children
of their region, they saw one of our XOs at a social gathering I attended with one laptop in my
hand. It did not take more than five minutes for both of them to jump at the idea of doing a
project in their country of origin. With the same zeal, discipline and enthusiasm they put to their
banking business, in less than 18 months they developed a philanthropic enterprise with dozens
of full time employees and hundreds of volunteers working in almost all the major provinces of
Nicaragua starting a domino effect in neighboring Costa Rica, Honduras, el Salvador and
Panama. En each case, they invite corporate clients, several educational institutions, not to
mention the respective governments, into a unique and highly positive “triangle of love for
development” as, with certain picaresque wink in their eyes, they describe the ideal combination
of national resources in order to make of a project like this a “project of a country, not a project
of a government”.

Who knows if within a few years, one of the Miskito Indians, son or daughter of an illiterate
fisherman in this sleepy, almost medieval forgotten town of Bilwi will become, through his XO,
the next code-writing, innovative and creative citizen of a new Nicaragua, one that took the
challenge of a Revolution of Hope and catapulted it into the XXI Century. Free of demagogy and
false promises, this time with a new and refreshing breed of developers of future Facebooks,
Googles, eBays equivalents or with a better and larger examples of LAFISES, Bancentros,
Parmalats and food processors, these future Nicaraguans may indeed be the redeemers of
previous lost generations . That day, the Zamora Teran and their children and grand-children
will realize that indeed, by giving a laptop, they did change their world.

Rodrigo Arboleda- Chairman and CEO, One Laptop Per Child Association.
An image worth a thousand words