Charlene and I have volunteered to help with an NGO called Digital Divide Data this winter.  DDD trains disabled landmine and polio victims in Cambodia and Laos, considered otherwise to be unemployable by local custom.  They train them on employment skills, English, and computer competence; provide them employment at 3 times the going wage; and provide them with time off and tuition to gain degrees from local colleges. Students who complete the programs are very employable, and often go on to start their own businesses, which allow them to employ successive classes of graduates.

This effort is sustained by selling computer services like data conversion to institutions in the US and Europe.  The do not really compete with our businesses because they are able to provide services so cheaply that they do projects that would otherwise be considered impractical to do -- jobs like digitalizing the last hundred years of the Harvard Crimson. DDD was written up by Thomas Friedman in his book, The World is Flat, If you want to learn more about them, go to http://www.digitaldividedata.org/  ..... 

We will be going to Vien Tien in Laos for two months in January.  Our focus will be on coaching project managers and reviewing processes for improved performance, better quality control and better communication between operations, project management, sales and the customer.  That’s a long way from home and a long time away from home, but it should be a great adventure -- sort of a delayed Peace Corp tour. 

We hope to share our experiences with you thru this blog.