Why am I writing? And what do I do?
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 voluntourism skepticism has taken over my “virtual personality”. This not only effects how I am viewed in the web world, but how people view the organizations I run.
I recently met with the founder of a large service travel organization to talk about voluntourism101.com and his thoughts for how to improve it/make the tool more user friendly, and some time after our meeting he wrote me something along these lines: “Before we met, I thought you worked in voluntourism and you were promoting the benefits of this way of traveling. It wasn’t until I met you that I realized that you are coming at this from the NGO side.”
As I’ve clearly virtually pigeon-holed my online-self, I thought I’d share how my real self would attempt to “classify” PEPY.
I wanted to clarify. I, and PEPY, are not operating volunteer tours which then turn into development projects. Instead, we are supporting the development of affordable quality education in rural Cambodia and our 10 tours per year are one way we raise funds and awareness to support similar changes globally.
PEPY is an educational development organization. Legally, we are an INGO – registered both in the US and Cambodia. We operate through the work of 30+ local Cambodian staff, the majority of whom are directly from the rural areas in which we work. We now employ three foreign staff but are working towards a place where programs are managed by Cambodian staff with foreign staff working only on donor management, fundraising, budgeting, and connecting to partner NGOs/outside ideas to add to the strategic planning process.
We operate formal and non-formal education programs in 11 villages, with library and literacy programs in 10 schools plus a variety of other teacher training and supplemental education programs.
That is the reason we are in Cambodia, the main work that I support, and why PEPY exists. We also offer educational trips for our donors which raise additional funding for our programs and help travelers learn how to better support and understand NGO work globally and in Cambodia. This arm of PEPY is small: we only operate about 10 tours a year for the last few years.
So my verbose voluntourism ramblings come in part from being in the receiving end of volunteer projects, but also from living in a country where the number of international volunteers increases daily, though the positive impact these people have might not.
I hope that clarifies a bit more about what my “real” self does in Cambodia, when not speaking in the virtual world. Thanks for reading.