This woman has carried a photo of a young American girl named Ashley, whom she met while in the Thai/Cambodia refugee camps, for the last 20 years. She asks every American she meets if she knows Ashley. The picture if faded from where she has held it up for every blond haired or light-skinned passerby. [...]
We decided to write out our expectations of our foreign volunteers to help potential applicants consider what they are getting into. (FYI: We take volunteer interns to work in our office, typically on donor management, marketing, social media, type projects) The theme: if you are not coming here to learn and to “help” anyone but [...]
I am in the US for two weeks care of Ashoka and National Geographic as PEPY was a winner in the Geotourism Challenge last year. I am getting my talk ready for the conferences they are bringing us here to speak at, and one of the themes I usually focus on is about investing time [...]
One of the goals of our PEPY Tours is to change the way people live, travel, and give. We decided to send out our second post-trip survey, asking people who traveled with us many months or years ago to comment about the ways their PEPY trip influenced changes in their attitudes and actions. What questions [...]
I just got back from the US. Spanning two worlds that are so different, where I am perceived so differently can be confusing for the brain. I can’t decide if I prefer to do my visit to the US in one big annual chunk, as I used to, or in more sporadic bursts of other-worldness [...]
Blogging allows us to take “Reinvent yourself!” to new heights. Even when we don’t mean for it to happen, our “virtual” selves, and our “real” selves, might have little to do with each other, and the “virtual” world around our blog, twitter, and facebook posts might never know. Since I started blogging here, my outspoken [...]
Here is an interview travelfish did on PEPY: http://www.travelfish.org/feature/161 One of the questions they asked was about the changes I would love to see in tourism in Cambodia. Here are my answers: 3) You say on your website that “PEPY Tours aims to catalyse a large-scale, transformational change in tourism.” What do you think is [...]