I try to avoid spending much time on “bar street”, a place in Siem Reap which is full of, yep, bars. The main reasons I avoid it now are no longer just the noise, the embarrassing displays of lack-of-clothing on gap-year tourists, the drunken fools, nor the begging, though those reasons alone should be enough…. [...]
What is this “sustainability” thing all about? It is a word that gets thrown around so often by NGOs, donors, and most people working in development, yet what is means in the reality of our day to day decisions is less often understood. I wrote part one of a two part look at PEPY and [...]
Enough stamping our feet about what isn’t working in voluntourism! This site was an idea for something we needed when we were searching for resources on how to improve our volunteer travel offerings at PEPY Tours. We knew that we couldn’t be our own auditor and needed an outside resource or body to help us [...]
I just read this post “9 Reasons Not To Give Things Away” and I agree with it. It relates back to my earlier post discussing how a group working in the same area as us in Cambodia subsidized water filters and thereby destroyed the market for the product (and negatively effected water filter use/health). I [...]
Another post inspired from the Tales from the Hood blog, this one about honesty and NGO propaganda. A comment from Mo-ha-med (below) is something I really agree with: I’m particularly curious about a remark of yours about how the PR dept needs to communicate things in a certain way and that we shouldn’t “believe our [...]
One of the few blogs I check on a semi-regular basis is Tales from the Hood which recently had a post about dependency. I added these thoughts: This reminds me a bit of the World Food Program. Last year, during the food crisis, rather than cut back on what food was delivered, stop programs which [...]
At university, I took a class called “Medical Ethics”, and it was one of my favorites. Rather than telling us what he thought was right or wrong, the professor would have us read real medical case studies and then discuss and debate the ethical decisions which had been made in each case. I would love [...]