We went there the first time in the dead of winter, in January 2008. The temperature was around -10 degree C when we were there. Indoor heating was basically not available, and we wore heavy coats even inside, some even when in bed. The hardest thing was washing our dishes with ice-cold water after meals.
In summer 2009, under the threat of H1N1, the team wore masks on the airplane flying from Hong Kong to Gansu. Everyday we took the temperature of the students when they get up and made them take vitamin C pills. With God’s blessing, no-one got sick throughout the project. Protecting ourselves against a virus is not new to us.
Finally, we set up a video conferencing system, and started running weekly online classes on English for the kids in Gansu taught by teachers from Hong Kong. We tested the system while we were at the orphan school.
We taught another class after we returned to Hong Kong.
The teachers from a Christian primary school in Hong Kong committed to teach the weekly English class. That was supposed to be the beginning of a long term eSL/TeSL project (Technology-enabled Service-Learning).
Then the Mainland Chinese government shut down the school.
That was the greatest heartbreak from our SL projects. We were so angry we decided to break out of China and started taking our teams to Cambodia, opening up a whole new world for us. It was almost if God allowed the door to be slammed in our face, to drive us away from the comfort zone which was China, to the strange new world of foreign countries where we do not know the language, the culture, … To this day, however, the photos of all the kids of the orphanage sit on my bulletin board. I took a photo of each and everyone of the 50+ kids at the school for the school’s records. For some of them, that was the first time they had their photo taken.
Today, 10+ years later, in 2020, the coronavirus forced the cancellation of all our offshore SL trips for the year. It also forced social distancing everywhere, making most of our planned SL projects in Hong Kong impossible. Not willing to just give up, we are scrambling to find alternate ways to deliver service. Some are interviewing the clients and the NGOs online, to find out their needs. Some are setting up small classes with the children at home. Some are developing game-like environments for the clients to play/interact with. Some are creating virtual worlds for the clients to experience online, e.g., virtual tours of the university campus. eSL/TeSL again!
On the one hand, we are forced to improvise in response to the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus - while hoping that the virus will eventually go away so that we can return to our normal Sl projects.
On the other hand, however, we are preparing for a new reality. Social distancing and gravel restrictions may be here to stay. Even without the new reality of global pandemics, it is not practical to send large numbers of students offshore for extended periods of time. If we are to scale up the number of student involved, and the duration of the service projects, we have to turn to technology so that we can deliver some service remotely. After all, with so much technology available, it almost seems a crime to not make use of the technology.
eSL/TeSL is (a key element of) the future of SL.
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