We are the guys from upstairs who play loud music and disturb everyone else. Currently, there are eleven interns working for OLE Nepal. All of us are intelligent, hard-working, and energetic young high school graduates committed to helping change the Nepalese education system.
We were too lazy to apply to colleges while still in school, so we had a year with nothing to do. Fortunately, OLE Nepal beckoned us, and now we have something interesting and worthwhile to fill our time with. Some of us are seasoned veterans who have worked long hours until late at night on weekends to meet deadlines. Others are newbies who grumble all the time about not having their own desktops.
When not arm wrestling or flirting with the girls next door, we are usually trying to fix the few broken laptops from the schools. Most of the time, we end up solving the innumerable important problems that everyone wants taken care of but no one seems to have the time for—simple things like getting the laptop to type in Nepali or adding the Nepali language to an activity.
Sitting in front of our computers, we browse through a million pages, writing emails to hundreds of people looking for solutions. Then there are the minor tasks: a pinch of documentation on the OLPC wiki, a dash of translation, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Basically, we do just about everything everyone throws at us.
We are also going to play a major role in the larger OLPC deployment next spring. We will be staying at the schools for a month, training teachers and students to use the XOs.
Right now, we are working on:
However, our work cannot be labeled as "charity" because our involvement with OLE Nepal has given us more than we had bargained for.
For starters, we get to be around hard-working and passionate people who are wholly dedicated to the cause of this organization and to Nepal. The opportunity to work and interact with them has been both exciting and stimulating.
We also get to meet brilliant people from different walks of life who continue to contribute to society in their own ways. Additionally, it’s amazing how much we learn and discover every hour of every day.
Our work experience can be compared to an unusually long training course—with the added bonus of not being billed for it. Of course, the best part is realizing that, for the first time in our lives, we are working for something we truly believe in.
Mainly because our bosses say so.
Also, because open learning has the potential to bring technology to the masses and spread the open-source movement throughout Nepal. For us, the open-source movement is not just about using, modifying, or distributing software for free instead of paying thousands of rupees for commercial software (or a few hundred for a pirated copy).
It represents the idea that human knowledge has greater value when shared, and that arbitrary restrictions on information only serve to stifle progress.
The OLPC laptops exclusively use open-source software, and we can’t think of a better way to spread free software than by giving it to people who had never even heard of computers or the Internet. But most importantly, open learning will change the lives of underprivileged Nepalese children by opening up a whole new realm of opportunities for them.
So far, we are doing very well.