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
- Build
- Find communities with electricity and internet but no AI education. Build affordable labs. Treat every deployment as an experiment.
- Phase 3 · Ongoing
- Show
- Publish everything — what worked, what failed, what it cost. Make every step reproducible by others.
- Phase 4 · The point
- Inspire
- Not 'watch me' — 'you could.' Ordinary people can build meaningful things in their communities.
Phase 1 · Active · 1 entry from the road · Moonlight Children's Home
About the project
Listening, before proposing.
After leaving my career in software engineering, I am traveling across Nepal — starting in Dolpa — 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, local innovation, and where AI can become a practical tool for learning.
After understanding the realities on the ground, the next step is to establish affordable computer labs using second-hand hardware and free AI tools — and experiment with what AI-assisted learning can actually look like in Nepal's remote schools.
- From
- Dolpa
- 2026 →
- 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.
Philosophy
We often try to solve problems before understanding them.
This journey begins by observing.
Technology is powerful. AI is transformative.
But neither should arrive before listening.
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.
