AS AN O.C. OF THE CAMBODIA SERVICE LEARNING TRIP

Our Organizing Committee and Participant team.

What the Service is About ​I joined the Service Learning Trip to Cambodia in Winter for the second time in 2017. The Cambodia service Learning Trip is a week-long service in Cambodia which visits 2 to 3 NGOs and supports them in various ways such as teaching, manual labour, or installation of new structures such as water purifiers or solar panels. In this Service Learning Trip in Winter, we supported the three NGOs Cambodian Children's Fund, Wat Opot, and Who Will Village. This time, I served as an Organizing Committee member. It was a much greater challenge than serving as a participant, and it opened a whole new perspective for me. As an OC member, I became more aware of the team and paid more attention to how my team could work better together, rather than just my own performance. By holding regular meetups and discussions about our topics, my sub-team was able to brainstorm and sort through our ideas on what we wanted to teach for the children in Cambodia. My sub team taught about Globalization, which is a big concept. Thus, we had to break down the idea into several different components. One such component is the name itself, which we broke down in to "globalize", meaning to become more worldly or international, and "-ization" which meant that it is a process of something. We used multiple different examples to illustrate this and designed games to engage the children in learning about the concept. Although at times, we had negative feedback about our games being too complicated or not being related during our trial runs, we were able to improve and refine our teaching material and game designs to suit the needs of the children better.

The Biggest Challenge In the Service The most challenging part of the service was overcoming the language barrier. Although it was difficult to communicate directly with the children through English, we were also able to connect with them through non-verbal ways. Much of this included gestures, facial expressions, and overall maintaining a positive attitude and being open to meet and serve the children. In some parts of the service, the children had very limited English, therefore we could not teach them much about our topics. Instead, we planned several engaging activities to play with them and bring them joy and happiness through our company. Many of us gained deeper relationships with the Cambodian children and exchanged contacts to keep in touch. Meanwhile, in other parts of the service, the children we taught our topics to remained to have somewhat limited English proficiency. In this case, we performed our best to explain the concepts slowly and clearly with different examples and demonstrations, and also discussed more personally about their understanding of the concepts in smaller groups. Through our efforts to deliver our service, despite the language barrier, we felt satisfied with out work and our engagement with the children.

What I Learned from the Service ​In the service, I learned to appreciate the work of my teammates, to be more outgoing and courageous, and to appreciate my team’s flexibility in handling unforeseen circumstances. Earlier then when I first joined the Cambodia Service Learning trip as a participant, I mainly focused on my own work and what I could do to serve the impoverished Cambodian children by my own ability. However, as an OC member, I took on the responsibility of being a role model and a leader of my team. Through this, I helped to inspire my teammates and help them work together more effectively. As a role model, I shared my experiences in the previous service trip I joined and persevered to accomplish my parts of work with quality despite my own heavy workload from academics. I also made the effort to keep each of my teammates on track and keep them updated with the progress and ideas we have planned. In working to make my team more effective, we also developed a better understanding of each other through the team-building games we selected and found some strengths that could help us work together more efficiently. For example, some of us were more cheerful in speaking and so they could be more effective in hosting the games of our teaching plans, and some of us were better at technical design so we would ask for help in preparing presentation slides and different features of it from those more familiar. Furthermore, as a leader of my team, I had to step out to voice out my ideas on what could help make our service more effective for teaching the children about our topics, although I am not the best speaker within my team, I learnt from the experience both from the opportunities I took to speak out, and also from my peers to be more courageous and present better and discuss topics more vigorously. Also, I greatly appreciate my team’s flexibility as we faced some unforeseen circumstances, but my team was able to push through and work together to work around the changes in our plans and continue to serve the children. An example of this was about the service we held for Who Will Village. We held a booth-based carnival type event where groups of village kids would go from booth to booth to enjoy a fitness themed activity. In our original plans, we expected the village children to arrive at the village by a certain time, so we could group them together and then they would follow their group leader to different booths. However, in reality, the village children came in a much larger time span so that some village children came much later than the others. In this case, we had to keep some of our group leaders at the waiting area to form groups with the later arriving village children before they went out to play. We also expected much more village children to come so that they would challenge different groups in the activities and spend more time playing. However, there were fewer village children that arrived than we expected, so some of our booth games under ran, and some groups moved to new games earlier. In this case, us OCs of the team discussed quickly our options and decided to shift how much time each group spent in the booth. Because of the changes, the instructions we printed out on paper were no longer accurate, but from this experience, I appreciate my teammates for being flexible and settling with new instructions to accommodate the village children. Overall, the service was an eye-opening experience for me as I was able to view the service from a different, more team-oriented role, and the service provided challenges that helped me develop my leadership and teamwork with my peers.