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“Service” in schools is not all it’s cracked up to be
By Nicholas Alchin, Deputy Head and High School Principal United World College of South East Asia, nal@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg
Students from Kuma Cambodia I’ve just returned from a UWCSEA trip to Cambodia, where a group of students and parents were guided by three marvellous teachers (Claire Psillides, Nadine Mains and Andrea Felkner) in visits with three of our Service partners. These partners are NGOs with which we have long-standing collaborative relationships - Kuma Cambodia, Green Umbrella and Free the Bears. We saw first-hand what great work these groups are doing with their communities, and what contributions our students have made over the years. Buildings, paths, gardens, and painting are the obvious signs, but in these matters, relationships are the fundamental bedrock of partnership, and so our grade 4 - 7 students met, played with, laughed with and got to know the the ‘Kuma kids’. Rather undernourished, they look a few years young than they are (but they play football like pros, as our students found out the hard way). Initially a little awkward on both sides, it did not take long for the human bonds of youth to get beyond differences of colour, socio-economics or even language, and something more profound happened than can easily be captured in language after the event, that I hope and believe will stay with our the children long after the forget the football thrashing. Our parents learnt what service looks like in practice; also that ethical tourism can be of huge benefit to both tourist and local; that the effect on their children was deep; and that there are authentic ways for them to use the paid voluntary leave offered by many companies. We also squeezed in shopping and eating in NGO establishments, at prices with generous margins that support tailors, jewellers, seamstresses, waiters, cooks, and cleaners from poor and marginalised groups. We 18 EARCOS Triannual Journal
ended up with stomachs full of authentic local food, some splendid souvenirs, having made a contribution to people who are helping themselves. We left feeling we had made a small but meaningful difference, and that we had learnt a great deal. So why am I writing about a problem with ‘Service’? The problem I have is that the word ‘Service’ does not capture what we do these days. Long gone are the trips where we simply raised funds, visited to present them and then got treated like royalty. Those well-intentioned trips actually undermined the learning about partnerships that we want for our students, and were hardly conducive to the dignity of our partners. No; and as I have described these trips have evolved into an experience whereby our students come to learn a systems approach. That means that we need to learn look at problems from the perspective of the people who own the problems, not from a distance. Only then can we consider about how we might engage in long-term sustainable work to help the community meet these needs far into the future. So we intend this Primary/Middle trip to be a basis for these students to continue with these partners in future years, into High School and hopefully beyond (some of our alumni students work in NGOs during Gap years, for example). In other words, the trip is fundamentally about the learning for our students and - this is key - to do this, we need our service partners to bring about this learning just as much as they need us.