About
Why Autism?
We were keen on this topic from the beginning also because of the fact that our assistant coach, Icha, has had experience about autism when she held an Autism campaign in her country before; and Sophie, our content writer, has a younger brother who is diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (a type of autism). With both of their experience from the inside and outside points of view, we are confident that we can create a website with rich content and useful information.
Autism awareness is difficult to raise, and in fact has not yet been raised in many countries, especially under-developed ones. What we have been trying to do while working in this project is to make more people be aware of autism and find better ways to cope with it.
The team
Kalstra Pacific (Kalstra has the letters of the team members' first names in it) contains of six students of six different schools, five countries, four time zones and three continents! Alice is from America, Lan and Tu from Vietnam, Sophie from Taiwan, Adi from Indonesia and Tom from Australia. Our two coaches, Icha and Rianti are from Indonesia. Together we have formed up a team with great diversity as you can see. And we have experienced that true diversity while working together on Infinite Mind.
Alice, Lan and Sophie are in charge of the site's content. While Lan and Alice write the content mostly based on their research on books, newspapers and the Internet, Sophie gives an inside look from her brother's study case and interview with experts. Adi is the translator of the site, who has manually translated all the content from English into Indonesian! Tu, together with Adi, created cute illustrations and graphics for the site. And last but not least, Tom put up everything to make a site as you can see here.
Working across different time zones gives us a chance to realize the incredible strength of the internet, instant messenger and online forums. With the team being scattered all over the world, we had only email and our online Yahoo group and forum with which to communicate. This online communication has brought us together to become really close friends. We adopt each other's style of talking (Adi's "shy mode", Lan's "sighing mode", and Rianti's "serious mode"), share interests (of watching Korean drama between Lan and Sophie, or of chatting at mid-night), learn from each other's strength and weaknesses. We have been through ups and downs together - at the time this site was finalized, Tom - our main techie - fell ill and had to go to the hospital, Alice's computer failed to work, Rianti had no internet connection and Lan's PC broke down! However, with great determination as a team, our site is still finished and ready to be launched. And all of this makes "win or not" becomes much less important compared to what we have gained. Together we have pushed ourselves beyond all our limits so that Infinite Mind can be available to you now. We hope that you enjoy it!