Retired pastor James Anderson, age 84, has never worked in IT or had any formal computer training, but over the past two years he has rebuilt more than a hundred IBM ThinkPad laptops and sent them to schools and nonprofits in Africa – all running Linux.

For the past nine years, Anderson has volunteered at FreeGeek, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit that recycles and rehabilitates old computers for donation. He spends four hours every Friday testing and rebuilding the ThinkPads, which he then loads with Linux Mint 17 and sends one or two at a time to Africa via personal couriers.

It's a passion project Anderson began in 2006, after he and his wife spent 13 weeks in Zimbabwe teaching math at a rural boarding school near the Mozambique border. When they returned, he began looking for a way to continue to help the kids he'd met there.

He has always been a tinkerer and loved computers; he's owned one since the mid-1980's when laptop precursors, known as “luggable” computers, weighed more than his wife's sewing machine, he said. So when a neighbor told him about FreeGeek he saw the chance to help through technology.