When I was looking for a volunteer project in Latin America, I wanted to go with a grassroots organization instead of a larger and more institutionalized one. Deciding to concentrate on small organizations meant that it might be harder to find information about them and to find feedback from prior volunteers. This blog entry describes a small organization that deserves your attention if you found this entry by searching for something like "latin america volunteer."

The organization is called Asociación MAPU and most of its activities take place in or near Esquel, Argentina, in the province of Chubut, in northern Patagonia. It offers various volunteer projects on its Patagonia Volunteer Web site.

I found little independent information on the Web about MAPU, other than that it had won a UN award for virtual volunteering. So although I found no reports from prior volunteers, I decided to go for it. And I have no regrets.

The AIMS Workshop on Volunteer Computing took place on 16-20 July 2007 at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg, South Africa (a suburb of Cape Town). Roughly 35 students from over 200 applicants from across Africa were selected. They came to learn about using BOINC, Open Source software for distributed computing, for projects in Africa. (Although I call the workshop attendees "students," back home they are predominately graduate students, researchers and professors.)

The workshop was funded by the Africa@Home project, whose goal is to promote distributed and Open Source computing in Africa. This was also a good match for the goals of our hosts at the AIMS, which during the academic year offers a nine-month post-graduate program in advanced mathematics, attracting students from the entire continent.