Motorcycle
Diaries.
A long, slow journey to understand education before trying to change it. Listening first. Nepal first.
Starts in Dolpa. Continues, one district at a time.
Four phases
- Phase 1 · Active
- Listen
- Travel slowly. Visit schools. Document teachers, students, and infrastructure. Understand before proposing.
- Phase 2 · Upcoming
- Connect
- Crowd source second-hand laptops or old phones. Setup computer labs. Connect remote teachers to students, with AI in between to help students learn.
- Phase 3 · Upcoming
- Schedule
- Software that matches those teachers to schools and holds the timetable, so a remote class can happen as often as possible
- Phase 4 · The point
- Show
- Publish everything — what worked, what failed, what it cost. Not 'watch me' — 'you could.' Create community and open-source education.
Phase 1 · Active · 3 entries from the road · Laini, Dolpa
About the project
Listening, before proposing.
After leaving my career in software engineering, I am traveling across Nepal to understand how education is experienced in places rarely represented in policy discussions.
Rather than arriving with answers, this project begins with listening. Along the way, I document schools, teachers, students, infrastructure, and local innovation, capturing what the schools themselves say they are missing: lack of qualified teachers willing to stay in such places, or lack of infrastructures to even hold the classes in.
The project was supposed to start at Crystal Mountain School in Dho Tarap, Dolpa at 4,200 metres, one of the highest schools in the world. However, after trekking halfway there, a lack of coordination among the staff meant the visit could not happen as planned. Having spent time in Dolpa, I am now back in Damak, Jhapa to celebrate Dashain with my family. After Tihar, the journey will resume in districts across the Far-Western region of Nepal.
- First attempt
- Dho Tarap
- Turned back · Dolpa
- Districts
- 77
- Across Nepal
- Method
- Field
- Interviews · Notes
- Format
- Open
- Read & cite freely
Why “Motorcycle Diaries”?
A journey, before the revolution.
The name comes from the journey of a young Ernesto “Che” Guevara across South America, years before he became a revolutionary. He travelled through remote towns, mining communities, and leper colonies, documenting what he saw in what later became The Motorcycle Diaries. The journey changed how he understood the continent and the problems its people faced.
Years later, after Fidel Castro and Che overthrew the Cuban dictatorship in 1959, education became one of the first priorities of the new Cuban government. In 1961, thousands of volunteers travelled to rural communities to teach literacy, helping raise Cuba's literacy rate from around 60–75% to 96% in about a year.
This project borrows its name from that journey, not its politics.
A nation changes when enough people believe in a better future and choose to build it together.
Field notes
From the notebook.
Short entries written on the road — some the day they happened, some later, from memory.
An open project
This is not a story about one person doing something remarkable.
It is a documentation project.
Every cost, every mistake, every method will be published openly.
The point is that it is reproducible.
From the road
Nothing scheduled, nothing promotional — a note when there is something from the field worth sending.