The Students from Yong-Chun High School Took a Trip to Volunteer in Indonesia, the Students Commented, “We Became

Giving back to the community, doing something meaningful with their summer, from the Newspapers, translated…

In order to have a different summer, the students from Yong-Chun High School chose to head to Aceh, for their thirteen days of volunteer experiences and cultural exchange.  The teacher sponsor, Hong said, this is the first time that the school had set up an overseas experimental summer activity, the students headed over to the Aceh region, to share with the local students, the culture in Taiwan, at the same time, to help the villages hit by the tsunamis to rebuild, to lead the local children in activities.

There were ten students and three instructors, Hong said, that Aceh was once the Southeast Asia’s seriously hit tsunami area, the locals took a decade’s time in rebuilding, and slowly, they were able to get their villages back to before the tsunami hit.

This time, the team went to the primarily Chinese school, Wei-Lee, Hong said, that the students needed to plan the lessons themselves, and share the cultures of Taiwan with the local students, and there were experience camps, where they’d taken the local students and made dumplings with them, making a summer time cold drink, “The students all prepared the lessons until one or two in the morn, just to make the lesson come to life the next day.”

The student, Nee Yuan said, she’d not been a part of an overseas service learning team, at first, she felt quite estranged with the local students in interactions, but, after a few hours, they’d become the best of friends.  She’d introduced the famous bubble teas, the meat bun in Taiwan, and, the local students had also shared their most savored dishes, the beef balls, the fried rice, for them to have.

The student, Shi said, that there’s a lacking in the water supply locally, a lot of kids needed to ride their bicycles down the hillside, to get water to bring up to their homes, she hoped she could give what she could, and help more in need.

Hong told, that the participant of this time’s activities are mostly first and second year high school students, and, the overseas volunteer experience is very important in training the students to become independent, to finish preparing the lesson plans on their own, to lead the group activities, the kids had matured a lot through the process, and, they were able to, make a special memory for their summers in the high school years.

And so, this, is a GREAT program, to get the kids to experience, how those in less fortunate backgrounds are living, and, by putting themselves in that environment, the students would’ve gained more empathy, and, become more matured in the process.