The Person Behind Marapedia
About the Founder
Marason Tleitu
Founder & Developer of Marapedia
👋 Introduction
My name is Marason Tleitu. I'm 25 years old, from the Mara community, currently based in Malaysia. I'm a self-taught developer, building apps and websites for the Mara people in whatever time I can find outside my day-to-day life abroad.
Being away from home made me think more, not less, about where I come from. In 2023, I wrote Mara Hlabu, a book collecting Mara song lyrics, and later turned it into a mobile app so anyone could carry the songs with them and read the lyrics on the go.
📱 Mara Hlabu on Google PlayMarapedia grew out of that same motivation: Mara Hlabu preserved the songs, and Marapedia expands that mission to history, language, stories, and culture — making sure it all has a home online that anyone, anywhere, can reach.
💡 The Idea
Marapedia began with a simple but powerful idea — to gather everything about the Mara people in one place and make it freely accessible to the world. Looking around, Marason noticed that there was no single source where you could learn about Mara history, culture, and heritage all in one place.
🤝 Why Community?
Preserving an entire people's heritage is far too great a task for one person to carry alone. No single individual could document all the songs, histories, poems, stories, and traditions. That's why Marapedia is built as a community project — where anyone from the Mara community can contribute, edit, and help preserve our shared legacy.
🎵 What We Are Preserving
The Mara people have a rich and unique culture — beautiful songs and hymns, poetry, histories of villages and clans, stories of leaders and community figures, and traditions passed down through generations. Much of this knowledge exists only in memory, scattered across individuals and communities.
🌍 Open to the World
Marapedia is written in four languages — Mara, English, Myanmar, and Mizo — so that not only our own community but the wider world can discover and appreciate who the Mara people are, where we come from, and what makes our culture unique.
🌱 Building for the Future
The deepest motivation behind Marapedia is the future. If we do not preserve our heritage in the digital world today, the next generation may never find it. Marapedia is being built as a lasting home for Mara culture — one that will outlive us all.
❝
Technology is moving fast. The Mara people deserve to be part of that world too — with our own history, our own songs, and our own voice preserved for every generation to come.
— Marason Tleitu, Founder of Marapedia