Help Making the World Less Volunteering is much about opening your mind to different ways of life, says Swedish man Sven Mauleon, who in 2001 cofounded the very successful volunteer organization OpenmindProjects.
Sven Mauleon has build up his organization OpenmindProjects on the simple belief that IT can and will be a very good help for poor people, when there are limited teaching and learning resources. With the help of a steady flow of volunteers, he is bring this belief out to the villages in Isan. the kids to learn English by themselves. At the same time the computers would widen their horizon and introduce the kids to the world outside and teach them that there is another future then the one in the village where job opportunities are very limited. After spending some time in Isan, Sven met a young curious and talented Isan student, Thaweesilp “Toto” Lunchaiyapha, who is from a poor Isan village himself. By working and paying for his own studies Toto had managed to learn how to use computers, and had gotten quite good at it as well. The two began a close cooperation and started developing OpenmindProjects. Toto would use his skills to create the website while Sven would write the content. The idea after this was to invite volunteers to come teach the kids in the villages. Inspired by other volunteer organizations such as Cross-Cultural Solutions (CSS), OpenmindProjects was launched in 2001. Attracting volunteers turned out to be a painless task since volunteering is becoming an increasingly popular way to travel.
By Sarah Mia Haagerup
o bridge the ‘digital divide’ - that is the idea behind the eight year old volunteer organisation OpenmindProjects. Co-founder of OpenmindProjects and experienced international consultant, Sven Mauleon who was born and raised in Sweden, wanted to help poor village people in Thailand and the way to do so he thought was to give them the tools to learn for themselves. The catalyst behind it all was a conference in Spain about how to bridge the digital divide, e.g. the division between those people who can use computers and access the internet and those who can not. Sven came to the conclusion that IT would be a good tool in helping underprivileged village people with limited teaching and learning resources so he started looking into the possibilities of testing IT learning in poor villages in Thailand. Isan, which is the northeast region in Thailand by the Mekong River along the Lao border, was the first place he started.
T
Bridging the divide with IT Sven has spent most of his professional career abroad. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he lectured at Thammasath University teaching International Marketing. After this in the late 1990s he moved to Brussels and worked as head of a European consulting firm helping companies to cooperate in EU funded projects, primarily IT and healthcare projects. It was during this time that he was
The challenge of volunteering
introduced to the idea of bridging the digital divide. The idea led him back to Thailand where he wanted to see if he could start up his IT project. He bought a house by the Mekong River, gave up his flat in Brussels and started meeting with people to discuss his ideas on how to use computers to decrease the increasing knowledge gap. “I said to myself, that IT can and
10 ScandAsia.Se • February 2010
will be a very good help for poor people, when there are limited teaching and learning resources,” Sven says. Sven realized that one of the biggest problems in especially Lao and Isan villages was that most teachers who are supposed to teach English to the students hardly speak any English themselves. But with the help of computers he thought that maybe it was possible to motivate
Today OpenmindProjects is very different from when it was started about eight years ago. The organization now also focuses a lot on team teaching (which is when the volunteer teaches alongside a local teacher) and eco-tourism, where the idea is to train local people to make money out of tourism and at the same time protect nature. Since 2001, well over a 1000 volunteers from all over the world have visited OpenmindProjects and for every year the organization grows bigger. Last year Sven and Toto received about 220 volunteers, a number which is increasing steadily. The volunteers, young to old, stay between one and three months