Speaking
Jon has a wide range of experience so the topics below touch on different topics he can speak on.
He can focus on one topic or incorporate different ideas into one speech.
Self-reliant living
Why do we make life so complicated? Why do we have to work so hard just to have food to eat and a place to stay, the basic things we use in our life? We have the ability to find these things easily if we learn how to be self-reliant. Learning this knowledge is easier than learning from university and is the truest form of freedom. We should never be hungry in the middle of a fertile world. We have water. We have soil. We have diversity of life and we have our good bodies. Why don’t we have enough to eat? If you can’t rely on yourself, even if you have money, you can’t have true freedom. Now is the time to come back to develop our basic skills to be able to rely on ourselves for our four basic needs in an easy and simple way for a simple and fulfilling life full of freedom.
Community building
We have become disconnected from ourselves and other people around us. This has made people feel very lonely and insecure. Deeply everyone yearns for connection but it’s hard to create this when we have been trained to be disconnected for so long. This is possible, to come back and reconnect with each other again. Jon Jandai will share his storytelling from the experiences he had as a child in a rural village of Thailand, to a rural adolescent in the big city of Bangkok, to his struggles and successes in creating a new community at his learning center near Chiang Mai. He shares how he sees people connect and what needs to happen for people to learn to live together in community again, whether that be in cities or in communities.
Alternative Education
Education is a problem for many people, especially for poor people or middle-class people who can’t afford it. We spend so much money and when we finish we feel like that knowledge is not very useful in our life. Getting a job seems unattainable. It’s time to think about education in a different way that we can learn. It’s not how to learn to look for a job but how to learn about ourselves. If you know what you like, it’s easy to develop yourself and rely on yourself from what you also like to do. Education to this goal has to be different from the mainstream education that focuses on obeying and following commands, following the stream, and ultimately be trained to be a good worker. This kind of education does not train us to be human, with our own ideas and innovation. Education based on freedom and love can help each person to understand themselves and develop themselves to fit the changing of the world. Education should not be a burden. It should be based in fun, based on what they love to do and based on the goal of developing understanding, not memorization.
Handmade and Eco building
How can we make shelter easy and cheap? Shelter should be easy for everyone to access. We can build from anything around us, from dirt, from straw, from wood, from bottles, from rice husks, or anything we have around us. All these things can be changed into shelter easily with less money investment. Housing needs to be cheap and easy for everyone. We want everyone to know that they have a choice to building their own house themselves. Humans don’t need to be in debt for 30 years to have a house, to work all their life to pay off a house to live in. Even without money, having a house is attainable. That’s the way life should be. In this talk Jo will discuss various ways of creating homes and buildings from locally available materials from his experience over the last 30 years working as a leader in alternative building.
Seed saving
I started to see the problems in farming in the past 30 years. This problem is that seeds are starting to disappear from the hands of the farmers and transfer to the hands of the companies. When this happens the diversity of food decreases drastically. We are trained to eat only a few varieties that are grown by companies only and the local varieties that were developed by our ancestors for us are dying off. When there is no seed, farmers have no freedom and can’t rely on themselves. They are made into slaves on their own land. Seed saving is the way to liberate farmers, to bring back food for humans again in a bio-diverse and sustainable way.
Experience:
Co-founder and main trainer at Pun Pun Sustainable Living Learning Center
Founder of the Nature Conservation group of Yasothorn of which 100 farmers are now involved
Co-founder of the Fair Business Company, connecting farmers to consumers throughout Thailand
Ted Talk in 2011 has received more than 8.5 million views
Speaker at the Encounter Education for Life Event in Mallorca with Satish Kumar
Gives at least 150 talks per year in and around Thailand with groups as diverse as farmers, government officials, nurses, ngo groups, temples, schools, and gatherings of the general public
Lead trainings at least three times a month on self-reliant living throughout Thailand and the region including Burma, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, the US and India.
Wrote and published six books in Thai:
Seed Saving: A Collection of Jon Jandai’s Talks on Seed Saving
The Love Life of a Shy Boy
Easy Way of Parenting- Jon’s Child
Grow (presently being translated)
Going Home (presently being edited)
Living with Earth (available on Amazon).