Service-Learning, virtually

We had great plans for our service-learning class for this summer.  One team will go to Cambodia and collaborate with other teams on our community learning centre in Kampong Speu that we have been building up over several years.  A second team will go to Rwanda to work on providing electricity to hundreds of households at a new site, by installing solar panels and wiring up the houses, again collaborating with a number of other teams.  A third team, also collaborating with other teams, will be going to Tanzania to install solar panels - this being our first foray to Tanzania, which I have visited twice to set up.  

The coronavirus, of course, changed everything.  At first we tried to delay the trips until later in summer.  Then perhaps at least one trip in winter.  For many of the students who must finish the course in summer, we scrambled to setup local projects for them.  Send them to develop virtual worlds introducing horseshoe crabs, the stranded dolphins centre at Ocean Park, and more STEM.  Then we will send them to nursing homes, special schools, primary schools, …, to bring these virtual worlds to people and children who cannot visit these places in person.  

Now, with the raging third waves of the coronavirus in Hong Kong, schools and practically all institutions are closed, essentially all human contacts are out of the question.  We can only fall back on the Internet, not only for the teaching, but also for the services themselves.  We will do anything possible to carry on.  With the teaching and the services.  The only thing we refuse to do is to give up. 

In fact, if we are going to deliver our services online, why can’t we do it across countries and even continents?  So we are reaching out to partners in Vietnam, Cambodia and Rwanda.  Our students will develop a variety of virtual worlds, and STEM projects that the children can carry out themselves.  And our students will deliver these services across the oceans through the Internet.  So we will still go to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Rwanda after all, virtually.  The teaching and learning and the service are real.  Just that we will only be there virtually. 

We will not be defeated by a virus.  

This is adaptability in action.