How to get involved in PEPY!

For those who are new to PEPY - Welcome! Thanks for visiting!

If you are intrigued by our "Adventurous Living. Responsible Giving." motto, want to support our educational, health, and environmental programs, or are looking to spread the word about our tours, we would be delighted to have your support! Here are some ways you can get involved in PEPY, both from home, and here in Cambodia:

LEARN: To continue to learn more about PEPY, read through the Discover What PEPY Means section, including our Responsible Tourism Statement, and explore the PEPY People Network. Of course you should also explore www.pepyride.org if you want to learn about our educational programs in rural Cambodia. If you want to keep up to date on PEPY issues, sign up at the bottom of our homepage where it says Receive Our Newsletter. We will send you the PEPY newsletter at the end of every month highlighting our upcoming tours, educational program developments, and information on topics relevant to PEPY: Cambodia, environment, health, etc.

SHARE: Send our link out to your friends and family! Know anyone who might want to ride their bike through South East Asia or spend a week learning about and exploring rural Cambodia off of the main tourist track? Have any friends who are looking to support grassroots education, health, and environmental programs? You can highlight PEPY's work by sharing our YouTube site with your friends or by becoming a fan of PEPY on Facebook. Learn more ways to support PEPY here.

JOIN: Join a PEPY Tour! By coming out to Cambodia and joining a rural educational tour or one of our cycling adventures you will have a chance to see PEPY's programs first hand. Beyond just seeing our work, you will become a permanent part of the PEPY team and will help us shape our educational experiences for future travelers. Many PEPY Tour participants have contacted us to say that their experience was catalytic. Through the trip, they not only realized their power to change their own lives, and hence the world, but then they went out and did it.

GIVE: If you are not able to join us in Cambodia but would like to support the work we are doing, you can donate here or visit the PEPY network to learn about fundraising ideas from past participants. Many people have come up with creative ideas to raise funds for PEPY and promote the issues PEPY is supporting.

TEACH: One of the best things about starting PEPY was meeting all of you amazing people out there who are already living and acting upon the ethos which PEPY is trying to promote. Keep it up! We would love to learn about your work and promote it through our newsletter and website. If you, or someone you know, wakes up each day and goes out to work on making the changes they hope to see in the world a reality, we want to hear about it!

Thank you for your interest in PEPY. We hope you will choose to join us!

Gmail Blogs, and so should we?

I find this whole "blog" culture so interesting.... in some ways great, and in other ways, not so great. These short "blog" applications - more like small updates (facebooks "what are you doing now" feature and twitter, which I have only heard about but sounds frightening) seem like a horrible waste of time to me. Do I really want to know exactly when each friend is "bored and sitting down to read a book" or that a friend is "leaving the house now to go to the movies" and then 20 minutes later "is at the movie and bored". REALLY? Do we need to share every bit of our lives?

I have a friend who just removed himself from facebook because he found that he was looking at it too much and that he didn't want to know all of those things about his friends without actually speaking to them. I can understand that....

On the other hand, longer blogs, with more content than a minute-by-minute play-by-play of someone's day, can add value to one's thoughts and struggles and I appreciate this part of our new blog-tastic culture. We can learn things about the ways people think and feel. We can learn that other people and companies are out there trying and get updates about the steps along the way. I was reminded of our blog-world by the google blog "Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Right-side Labels and Chat" which greets me whenever I check my email, reminding us that the brains behind gmail are working away too.

Speaking of play-by-play daily updates. I'm tired. I'm going to bed now. Have a great day (or night!) wherever you may be!