Eight-year-old Hender received his Canaima last year in the second grade. His mother, Carmen Reverol, said he often gets math and Spanish homework he’s expected to do on the computer. But Hender seemed to struggle with the machine.

Asked what he could do with the computer, the boy said he could take pictures with it. Pressed about other ways he uses the computer, he said “I like to look at pictures, too.”

Deomira Rosales is the secretary of education for Venezuela’s most populous state, Zulia, where Hender is a student.

She said that while the central government has been handing out Canaima laptops in Zulia, local education officials have been cut out of the process. The computers have only been given to national schools — run by the central government — while state schools have been excluded, she said. And many of Zulia’s teachers aren’t familiar with the machines.

“What sense does it make to hand out computers if the teachers don’t even know what’s on them or how to use them?” she asked. “We haven’t even been allowed to evaluate them to see if the software is appropriate for our students.”

The government does have a website dedicated to the computers and the educational software with a special section for teachers.

Rosales is also the sister of Zulia’s former opposition governor Manuel Rosales, who fled the country in 2009 amid corruption charges. He and his followers claim those charges were trumped-up by Chávez to sideline him before the 2012 presidential election. Deomira Rosales suggested the laptops were being used as political gifts to try to woo the state’s poorest families in the run-up to the vote.

Rosales said her office remains focused on creating school-based computer labs — that are also open to non-students — where trained staff can guide users.

Other families contacted by The Miami Herald in Maracaibo admitted that they had sold their Canaima laptops.

Hacker, of OLPC, said his organization cracked that problem by requiring XO users to log into their school network every 48 hours. If they don’t, the computers go dark.

“If you’re not in school for two days, your laptop is just a piece of plastic,” he said. As a result, less than half a percent of all the laptops issued by OLPC have been stolen or gone missing over the last four years, he said.

While many Latin American nations have embraced the one laptop per child concept, there are some notable holdouts.

Mexico and Colombia, in particular, do not have national programs, Hacker said.

Hernando José Gómez, director of Colombia’s National Planning Department, said the private sector is already producing cheap and powerful computers, and financing for the machines means that even the most humble families can afford them.

The chokepoint, as the government sees it, is access to the Internet. That’s why the administration is focused on expanding its fiber-optic network from 200 to 700 municipalities over the next few years. It’s also rolling out a plan that would subsidize the Internet for the nation’s poorest, he said.

“We think that computer labs are still the best way to use computers as tools for research and learning,” he said. “But we would never rule out a one laptop per child approach.”

The Canaima project has yet to reach its full potential, but it’s clear that it has been a hit with the families that have benefited from the program.

“I like the changes that Chávez is making to the educational system,” said Hender’s mother, who has put five other children through school. “This is the first time anyone in the family has had a computer.”