A team of 15 TNUA art ambassadors dispatched by the Office of Student Affairs in cooperation with VYA Taiwan served a school in Cambodia last month.
The team, formed by students from different fields – art, music, theatre, dance, new media and art administration and management – spent 12 days at the Cambodian English School for Higher Education (CESHE) in Siem Reap, chiefly helping about 50 young people from eight villages in the area.
The team designed two specific programs for the CESHE services to help its students learn English: one through theatre training and the other through activities aimed at beautifying the campus.
The ambassadors were not only serving the local community, but at the same time were also promoting understanding of Taiwan's art and culture, and learning to be more independent in their own education.
Siem Reap is about seven kilometers from the World Heritage site of Angkor. It is an economic backwater where many of its children and young people lack educational resources and do not have an opportunity to learn English properly.
CESHE provides free English lessons to its students and currently there are about 200 of them, aged five to 27.
With funding all coming from donations, the school has only three teachers and three classrooms, and each student is able to attend class for only about 1.5 hours each day.