The Community Project I had taken along with my group-mates to Bintan Indonesia was an eye-opening experience into service learning. The following are the important takeaways I have gained from the experience:

• Leadership and Teamwork.

During this community project, I feel like my inclination towards leadership has grown. Needing close collaboration with my group, we did struggle initially to manage our schedules and personal commitments with the time it takes to prepare resources for a project like did. However, I found myself delegating tasks often, asking questions that will guide the group forward or creating resources like the previously linked powerpoint presentation. I enjoyed working in a group and ensuring that our group stays focused to our goal of ‘developing a lesson plan and educational resources to promote 21st century skills’. Furthermore, I discovered the importance of playing to the natural strengths of people in the group. To create the book for example, I relied on my teammates who were artistically inclined to envision the art and colours, whilst I worked on the narration, plot and including important English language chunks in the book. Furthermore, the teamwork this project required was not only between our group members but also between educators in my school, UWC, and TIF educators. Online communication and consistent communication were skills I developed here to ensure that our group had the right aims for the students we were about to teach

• The practice of seeking the insight of experts

During this community project, my group had several times when we felt like we needed to reach out to educators of certain age groups to create a lesson plan for them. We had set up a meeting with a teacher of 5th grade and understood how he tailored his lessons to be age appropriate for his students and applied that to our lesson as well. It was very helpful to reach out and speak to people with expertise to better understand the nature of the project that we were doing. Additionally, research into journals and reports produced by the NGO’s in Indonesia or the Indonesian government gave us a better sense of the barriers the community was struggling with in terms of their education needs. We learnt that effective research leads is important to the effective implementation of a project so that we are not blindly serving a community.

• Breaking prejudices and a new service mentality

Once of the first things that we had learnt in the community was that the locals did not want to be seen as an object of pity or an object of rarity that tourists should come and look at blindly. The community was strong, independent and unique in their own rights and our service trip was not meant to be to benefit us or ‘look good’ but was truly meant to benefit the people without pity. It was an interesting ethical dilemma in service learning that we had to grapple with as we went along with our project. Through the conversations with the local community in Pengudang, I feel that my understanding on the aims of service were clarified and I gained practice in engaging in service without ulterior motives. I can now be more appreciative of true service learning and have learnt to spot-check where my own prejudices arise during service projects and correct myself. This understanding has definitely transformed my experiences with community service.