Our Hello UK! English Camp members all work in different fields; we have different life with different friends. We are all here because we were all studying in UK. After we came back to Taiwan, we hold a lot forgathers just in order to meet more friends who have same experience. When the group is getting bigger and bigger, we are all thinking what we can do for our homeland. We are willing to give and we’ve discussed many ways to help others. However, it’s very difficult to find something in common in this group. Finally, we found that all of us can speak in English. Therefore, teaching English sounds the best way to contribute to the Taiwanese society. We have started with no funding at all, all members came out with their own resources to make it happen. Someone provided printing papers, someone bought colour pens, some people don’t know how to teach but they came here to drive us to school. In this English Camp, we contributed our love to children, and we got a lot of feedback from children’s smile. In this group, many of us work like dog but they don’t really enjoy their life, but… when we saw those children’s naïve smile… it’s just the best feedback.
There were 18 of us went to Da Shu primary school which is in E-land a few weeks ago. We hope children can learn English without any pressure. We want they all know that English is a language for communication, just like Mandarin. English is for our daily life to use, not for exams. I still remembered that time I taught them “ABC”, they have learned very quickly then I decided to play a game with them. When I picked a letter of “M”, one of children said that is Mcdonalds’“M”, then we played role play, I told them that they were customers, and I was the waitress in Mcdonalds. They have to tell me what they want to order. It’s so funny that they learn a lot of vocabularies about food, so… if one day, they really go to UK or other countries. I believe they won’t starve because of the language issue.
Now, our Hello UK! English Camp wants to go to as many remote districts as we can. To help more children to develop an interest in English, but it’s really cost a lot of money to do so. Therefore we have to get some funding to support our English Camp. We were lucky to get St. Andrews University’s funding last time, and we’ve also joined and won Johnnie Walker’s “keep walking”project. It’s a great achievement.