PLG Dongao: Where Teachers become Students
Written by Charlize Chen
Why I Shouldn’t Have Been at PLG
Joining Project Let’s GO! had always seemed like a product of fate. On the first day of teacher training, I realized I was the only volunteer who traveled from outside Taiwan to participate in the program. The world had just recently been shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States closed down everything except for grocery stores. Las Vegas, where I live, no longer shone like the City of Lights when we were confined to our homes for an indefinite period of time. When two months of uncertainty and growing cabin fever passed, my family collectively made the critical decision to travel back to Taiwan as we always did in the summer, except this time, it was at the height of a pandemic.
Armed with our Amazon-bought raincoats, gloves, and face masks, my mother and I endured the 14-hour plane ride straight into the government mandated 14-day quarantine. Before we even left though, I had applied for PLG with the intention of giving back to the community that partly raised me—my last opportunity before heading off to American university. All those summers visiting for months at a time inspired me to take pride in my Taiwanese heritage, especially at home where few people are educated about the country and its culture. Volunteering at PLG expanded that pride and encouraged me to embrace both the American and the Taiwanese in me. That is one thing I will always be grateful to PLG for: introducing me to people who tell stories of diversity and who are willing to hear mine. Following the three weeks of the program, those people became my great friends.
An Unforgettable First Impression
The first week of training ended with exhaustion from nights staying up creating curriculum, but also with buzzing excitement in anticipation of seeing the school and the kids. We hauled our luggages from subway to tour bus to train, finally alighting at the DongAo village train station. I can never forget the spectacular view of the rolling green hills and sparkling ocean that greeted us. After taking many group pictures, we headed off towards the school. The wheels of our luggages on the paved road disturbed the serene quiet of the late afternoon, almost serving as a signal announcing: “The teachers are here!” That, and our bright purple shirts. DongAo Elementary School was hard to miss as it likely occupied the largest area of land in the small village. Framing the main campus building was an open space with magnificent trees around the perimeter. This, I learned, would be the place where all the kids and teachers gathered after the final class to say goodbye for the day.
Before we could put our luggages away, a little girl and boy named Judy and Jack approached us and brought us over to the monkey bars by the playground, where they showed us flips that looked both impressive and terrifying. Judy liked to land on her knees; there were scars and red scabs peppering them. I already had the urge to reach out my hands and ask if she was alright. Before I could say anything though, she brushed it off and went another round. I realized how comfortable these kids were in this surrounding, unconcerned by the insects flying and crawling around or by the lack of air conditioning in the classrooms. As a suburb/city girl myself, I unfortunately took many things for granted, and it took some getting used to. However, it turned out that interacting with the kids and working to make the classes as fun as possible made me forget about these trivial things.
The Foreign Becoming the Familiar
Though the boys lived separately, rooming with 7 other girls was still novel to me. There was a lot of stepping over each other and moving to the side when I was washing my face so that another girl could use the sink that we all shared. But with that came late night talks when we got to know each other, chat about how our classes that day went, and plan out activities we were doing the day after.
The first morning of classes, I walked down to the courtyard for breakfast at around 7:30am, and was surprised to see four kids eating their own breakfasts with the other volunteers who had gotten there earlier. I grabbed an 玉米蛋餅 (commonly known as the breakfast of PLG DongAo) and went to sit down with the girl named Judy that greeted us the day before. She was eager to show me one of the nonsense games she became famous among the volunteer teachers for. There were many kids like Judy who were immediately open to hugging and playing with us. Inevitably, others took more time to warm up. Nonetheless, each one made me feel welcome in their school, whether it was showing me around the school grounds, enthusiastically following along with activities in class, or jumping in and smiling for a selfie I was taking.
A Small Epiphany
The teaching profession was something I viewed with trepidation. How could the satisfaction of teaching outweigh the stresses that accompany it? PLG provided me with the answer. The art group that I was in had decided on origami as our first day’s activity, complemented by teaching color-related vocabulary to the students. As the lead teacher, I could gauge the reactions of the kids from the front of the classroom. Following a few rounds of say and repeat, I posed questions to the kids about what we just learned. I felt this incredible sense of pride and satisfaction whenever someone answered correctly; that sense swelled even more when a student initially answered incorrectly but was able to work their way towards the right answer on their own.
Teaching art allowed me to witness the manifestations of creativity in the students. Even though we always gave a general project for the kids to work on, they always found a way to make it their own, or reinterpret the prompt entirely into something that can only be devised by a young mind. I could tell when they were engrossed in their artwork because the classroom would be peaceful but for the soft music that we played in the background. Sometimes, a few kids would ask to come back to art class after lunch to continue working on their project. The fact that we were doing something that the kids cared about and got excited over was enough to make me overlook the occasional need to use the “Quiet Down” chant when they would get a little rowdy. Those almost imperceptible sparks in their eyes inspired me to work harder each day, just so I could once again see their beaming smiles as they held up their finished clay dog or butterfly origami for me with delight.
A Teacher who Learned from her Students
Just like how every person takes on a different social persona, the other teachers and I only got to see the kids as students in a classroom setting. They were either loud and outrageously bold, reserved and obedient, or somewhere in the spectrum between both. Put simply, we saw the playful, childlike parts of them. Once the 3 o’clock school bell rang, many of the older kids hauled archery equipment the size of their bodies down to the basketball court for practice. Though the other teachers and I were curious, our cleaning duties prevented us from going down and watching.
One day, one of our session leaders sent a video of a group of the kids waking up at the crack of dawn to train for archery. After training, they would walk to the nearby harbor and help the local fishermen bring in the day’s catch—fly fish was DongAo’s specialty. Another clip showed a flurry of tiny warriors donned in aboriginal clothing with red face paint on the boys and elaborate headpieces on the girls. Utter ferocity and focus emanated from their faces: an essential piece of the ensemble. Those were our kids! Those were the same kids who danced to TikTok songs in between classes and ran up to draw on the chalkboard when we weren’t looking. I was in awe. Yes, they were kids. Yet they were also passionate, disciplined, and selfless, especially when it came to respecting pieces of their heritage.
An Impactful Final Night
On the final morning, the school buzzed with festivity and excitement in anticipation of the Final Presentation where the students would get to showcase to their families what they had learned in the past two weeks. We volunteers had also worked until late at night to decorate the multipurpose room, rehearse our scripts, and perfect our own performances (one of which involved me dressing up as a makeshift Elsa, trash bag cape and all). The final showcase ended the volunteer program with a note of finality, as well as contentment. Look at all we accomplished in such a short time together with these kids, I thought. I clapped and cheered until my hands were red and smiled until my cheeks hurt: my way of letting them know how proud I was of them.
Once most of the kids left—a few hung around to take photos or just to prolong our time together before they had to head home—each group of teachers cleaned up their classroom for the rest of the afternoon. We finished a few hours before dinner so my friend, Sherry, and I decided to take a stroll around the tiny village of DongAo. We got to see firsthand the living situation of the villagers there: run down, dilapidated concrete and steel sheet houses that the families of the kids we taught called home. As teachers, we only saw hints of this from the soles that were barely clinging onto a kid’s shoes or the small holes that would occasionally appear on their clothing. Of course, some families were better off than others. However, these things were only notable in retrospect because the kids played with each other regardless of their families’ economic capabilities.
On our walk, we sat down in front of a student named Emily’s house. With a few tables laid out and a homemade sign displaying the menu, her front yard had been turned into a little shaved ice shop. We ordered two cups and chatted with Emily’s mother about life in DongAo. Emily’s younger sister attended a school outside of the village, so everyday, their mother would have to drive their motorbike for half an hour to pick her up. We paid and thanked her for the ice and continued our walk. Along the way, we also encountered Willy, a dark-skinned boy who was always quiet in class. He and his little brother were carrying enormous garbage bags from inside their house. We approached them and they explained that they were waiting for the garbage truck, that this was their chore since their parents weren’t home yet. I couldn’t help but admire them, along with all the other kids: they had responsibilities that I was sheltered from as a child growing up in the States. I lived in blissful ignorance of where the trash went when I threw it away and always clasped my parents’ hands whenever I left home.
The kids took on a honed maturity and resumed familial duties as soon as they stepped foot outside of school grounds. In western culture, school is often compared to the likes of a prison. Yet, at DongAo, school seemed to be a place of happiness and freedom.
That night after dinner, Sherry and I sat in the courtyard. A cool breeze gently swept our loose hair. Aside from the faint sound of dinner being cleaned up in a room on the other side of the school, the telltale chirping of cicadas provided a chorus of the countryside summer. We chatted under the dim glow of the moon and stars, which seemed to grace the sky by the thousands. It was like this that our final night at DongAo ended: appreciating the little wonders of the small village our students called home.
And the Journey Continues
Luckily, my journey at PLG did not end the day we left DongAo. Wannie, PLG’s founder and program organizer, kindly asked me to become a PLG Fellow a week later. I gladly accepted if only so that I could extend my contributions to the organization. Every few months, I drafted an English lesson for middle schoolers and recorded an instructional video that would be presented in a classroom in Taiwan. I was able to maintain that special connection I developed with Taiwanese children even after I returned to the United States. I’ve also been a guest speaker at many of Wannie’s PLG and international perspective group talks, offering my voice as a Taiwanese American and advocating for this extraordinary program that showed me the value of cross-cultural service, education, and community.