More seriously, I spent some time in Africa after my first startup imploded. I volunteered in the pharmacy of a medical aid organization. Mostly I just got their ancient windows 3.1 machine set up with an ancient version of Access, (or something? I don't remember). I should have done a bit more teaching of how the system worked, but I wasn't even sure how it all worked. I'm pretty sure everything went to crap shortly after I left.
What I found more rewarding, and probably more useful than doing tech work, was helping kids have fun. The other bleeding hearts I was with were Ultimate Frisbee fans and we introduced the game to the local kids. We even had another aid worker bring a huge shipment of 144 frisbees into the country. This may seem frivolous, but one thing I noticed was that kids had tons of free time and were really eager to learn how to do fun stuff. Art, music, sports, etc. Computer programming would have been great, too... but there were hardly any computers.
What I found more rewarding, and probably more useful than doing tech work, was helping kids have fun. The other bleeding hearts I was with were Ultimate Frisbee fans and we introduced the game to the local kids. We even had another aid worker bring a huge shipment of 144 frisbees into the country. This may seem frivolous, but one thing I noticed was that kids had tons of free time and were really eager to learn how to do fun stuff. Art, music, sports, etc. Computer programming would have been great, too... but there were hardly any computers.