Website for 'fulfilling people's dreams'

SEVILLE, SPAIN: A social networking website where anyone can express a dream and the members commit themselves to fulfilling it is drawing thousands of people in Spain.

The website - www.lapapaya.org - started by Colombian architect Felipe Velazquez seeks to make the highest number of wishes come true for 'everyone who is ready to dream.'

The members known as 'papayos' commit themselves to making the dreams come true, but on the condition that the person asking for a favor offers his time and effort to make wishes of three other people come true.

The goal of the project is to create social consciousness among citizens to achieve sustainable development through the dreams of each individual, Velazquez said.

Velazquez, an architect by profession, quit his job at a firm in 2007 and moved to Barcelona, where he set about creating lapapaya.org, because he was tired of designing homes "without a care for the people who would live in them".

The papaya project serves humble wishes as well as others of larger dimensions such as a social housing development project in Colombia.

The website is named after a papaya because Velazquez's friends lovingly call him "El papayo". As papaya is a fruit with many seeds, he hopes that from his project "more complementary ideas will grow".

The only way to solve a bad economic situation is to work with innovation and creativity, to try and "make dreams come true", he said.

The initiative is financed with the sale of objects like bracelets, T-shirts and greeting cards made of recycled paper.

There are close to a hundred "dreamers" registered on the website at present, Velazquez said, adding that "No utopia is unattainable".

©IANS