Cambodia Service Learning Trip (Jan 2016)

The winter trip to Cambodia from January 5th to 11th was the tenth service learning trip since 2011. During this 7-day trip, participants visited Who Will Children's Village, Wat Opot Children's Community and Cambodian Children's Fund Centre.

Participants attended pre-trip and joint-trip workshop to prepare for the trip. These workshops aimed at building up the team spirit promoting active participation in the program and preparing activity plans. During the workshops, every participant learned their roles and responsibilities in these activities.

During the trip, participants are divided into two teams.

Team A
This team spent the first part of the trip in Wat Opot Community. On the first day, the team visited the Phnom Tamao Zoo with the children, taught them some basic knowledge of the animals and provided some post-zoo activities. On the next day, the team focused on teaching the kids some games such as how to make kaleidoscope, balloon rocket, tooth paste and cup telephone. For the second part of the trip, the team stayed at Who Will Village. On the first day, the team gave a lesson on emotion management. On the second day, the team had Science and Chinese culture teaching sessions and sport activities. On the last day, the team had two different lessons in classrooms and art activities.

Team B
During the trip, the team mainly focused on the two-day teaching activity for students in CCF and one-day activity in Who Will Village. There were a total of four topics for CCF, namely Leadership, Appreciations, Occupations and Science. After the teaching activity in CCF1 and CCF6, we also went to CCF5 for food program to assist in delivering food to the children and played with them in the playground. The team spent one day in Wat Opot and taught the children the culture of different countries and made some handwork. For the two days in Who Will Village, the team talked about Chinese New Year in the morning session. In the afternoon, the team played some mass games with the children and also set up a mini carnival with seven different games for the Who Will children and the village kids.

For the last day of the trip, two teams had a cultural exploration tour in Phnom Penh and visited Royal Palace, Central Market, S21 and killing field which enable us to know more about the culture and history of Cambodia.

After the service trip, some participants would like to raise more HKUST students’ awareness on the situations in Cambodia through initiating a post-trip service. They also tried to involve more students to join the post-trip event to raise fund for the NGO in Cambodia in order to release their financial burden and prevent them from closing down. Some participants expressed their enthusiasm on charity work and would like to spread the love they felt to the others in Hong Kong. They hope to use their ability to serve the community in Hong Kong.