“Arkun,” Cambodia

Ministry of teaching trips are back . . . overseas

Eighteen of our students have returned from a service learning trip to the southeast Asian kingdom that offered most of them cross-cultural professional experience.

The teachers in training completed a two-week placement at Kantrak Adventist School (formerly Wat Preah Yesu) in Siem Reap during the February 3-26 trip. Other students painted the outside of the Seventh-day Adventist church and hall on the compound. With help. The children living in the dormitories and in the orphanage would often coat the students with paint, too. Their companionship turned work into fun, said one of the students.

Comments from the teachers in training also show how some of the best connections with children develop outside the classroom. Worship is an important time. “I’ll cherish the times I sang and played music with them,” said one. While another “loved learning from my peers and mentor teachers,” shared activities such as a games night, a gardening program and a water park visit left a stronger impression.

More informal activities—playing sport and reading—are just as good, says senior lecturer Dr Jason Hinze. “I love it when our group fragments and you see individual students spread out over campus with the children.”

Jason coordinated the trip—the 23rd—for an initiative he developed called Ministry of Teaching Overseas (MOTO). It is the first overseas since COVID and the seventh to the school. Jason returns because “our teachers in training are immersed in rich community. They can’t just be tourists.”

MOTO is leaving a legacy. More than 350 students have participated in a trip since 2007, with India, Cambodia, Nepal and Tonga the previous destinations.