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As diplomat and education advocate, he must smoothly handle political sensitivities while convincing leaders of the program's economic benefits. Once a president or prime minister shows interest, Hassounah said, working out the details becomes a whole lot easier. "Software is a political decision," he remarked.

Hassounah's position puts him in personal contact with presidents and ministers, but "the children's excitement about the laptops and the opportunities they are provided are far more interesting and significant" than an international who's-who, he insisted.

Credit: Azhar Hashem

Khaled Hassounah

Hashem has seen her husband go from start-ups to diplomacy. On a recent trip to Rwanda, she and Hassounah, along with Negroponte, were among 12 people invited to a dinner with the country's president, Paul Kagame. Hashem was on a break from her MBA program at the Haas Business School at the University of California at Berkeley, which provided a rare opportunity to watch her husband sell the laptop program.

"It was seeing the president's eyes light up," Hashem said of the moment she said she truly understood Hassounah's impact, "and after the (country's) long, tumultuous history, signing on (to the project) for the next five years...even though the country has very limited means." And Hassounah? "He just liked that the president 'got it'."

During his involvement with OLPC, Hassounah has repeated the refrain that the laptops aren't so much about connecting kids to the Internet as they are about providing a gateway to self-education.

Not everyone agrees, of course, and Negroponte's project has been publicly flamed by technologists and educators. Microsoft and Intel have both criticized OLPC prototypes' limited software capacity and inability to run powerful proprietary programs. On the other hand, design engineers have questioned the programs' development--is this really the correct application of education theory and the appropriate solution to narrowing the digital divide?

Hassounah's stalwart support for the little-laptop-that-could might sound like an OLPC-issued script. Arjun Moorthy, however, who became close with Hassounah when the two worked together at IMlogic, said his friend believes in what he's doing. "He has two passions: one is building gadgets. The other thing he wanted to do was make the world a better place. Idealistic, but he believed it," Moorthy said.

Leaning into the couch at his favorite San Francisco coffee shop, Hassounah said he feels lucky to have left Jordan at a time when cutting-edge tech companies were almost unheard of, and the few that existed were joint ventures developing software for American markets. Had he not chosen to supplement his electrical engineering education, he said, "I'd still be in Jordan at a job paying $300 a month."

But Hassounah isn't trying to make an example of Jordan, which has enjoyed much more Internet start-up activity in the last few years. "It's about being given the basic ability to learn, continuously acquiring (skills) in life," know-how he had to gain on his own.

"I consider myself (lucky) that I was able to achieve what I wanted," he said. "I just didn't think it was fair for people not to be able to achieve all their dreams." His OLPC work, at its core, really is about setting up the groundwork to make that possible. Hassounah's wife recalled watching her normally solemn husband--at the Galadima school--chasing gleefully shrieking kids, many of whom had never seen a lightbulb, as they elbowed for control over two demonstration laptops.

With both wireless antennae raised, the XOs resemble cartoon bugs in the center of the swarm--and the usually straight-faced Hassounah was the king bee. "He became excited by their excitement," she said. "He was on his knees in the classroom." With the kids, "his walls are down and his inhibitions are down."

That's the kind of transformation Hassounah is striving to enable. "As a software developer, you think the biggest problem in the world is what the object model of your application looks like," he said. "And when you go into Nigeria, in the capital, where children have no textbooks, you realize there are much bigger problems."