features 7,523 miles from Kansas City, Missouri to Taiwan This summer, senior Sarah Cigas spent five weeks in Taiwan teaching English to children. Cigas travelled through a program called Aiding Individuals with Disabilities, also known as AID. “My mom had heard about [the program] through her friends,” Cigas said. “She suggested that I apply, so I applied, and I got the chance to teach English there.” Cigas, who has been to Taiwan before, says she “wasn’t nervous at all.” “I kind of knew what to expect and I was excited for that,” Cigas said. “I was just scared for the actual teaching part because I had no experience as a teacher. I didn’t know how I was supposed to teach.” According to Cigas, teaching the children did prove to be difficult. “We didn’t know how to teach,” Cigas said. “We did the workshops [before travelling to Taiwan], but it didn’t really prepare us for when we were at our actual schools. We had to learn from our lessons every day and try to figure out what to do. That was kind of a struggle because we were really on our own, and we’re just kids and we didn’t know what we were doing.” According to Cigas, she and the other student teachers spent most of
16
their time teaching and at their house. “We thought we would be living with a host family,” Cigas said. “But [the program] just rented us a house. There was a member of the military doing civil service that stayed with us and some random old guy who was cool. In the mornings, there would be a van that would pick [the student-teachers] up and drive us to school. We would teach that day, eat breakfast and lunch there, and we would go back to our house and have dinner brought to us from restaurants. We would just stay at the house at night and hang out and work on our teaching plans for the next day, and we did that Monday through friday for two weeks.” During the weekends, Cigas and the other students in her group would be taken to see various tourist attractions and the city. “We got to make pottery, see some temples, and walk around,” Cigas said. “At night at the house, we could go on walks.” After four weeks of teaching,the last week of the program was a “tour week.” All of the participants in the AID teaching program came back together from their individual schools that they taught at and “rode around in tour buses around the country.” “We would stay in hotels or hostels at night and visit tourist attractions during the day,” Cigas said. “We also went to a lot of night markets. They were
so cool, at night, you go to these outdoor markets and you can buy stuff for really cheap. We could buy clothes, gadgets and food.” Besides the travelling and teaching experience, Cigas’ favorite part of the trip was “the food, the fruit and the people.” “The food and the fruit were so good,” Cigas said. “Everyone always made sure I had fruit because they knew I loved it. My group in my house was great and we became a family. We lived together for four weeks, and so that was a really good bonding experience.” For Cigas, her trip to Taiwan was an experience she will “never forget.” “I would definitely recommend [going to Taiwan],” Cigas said. “I developed skills on how to be a teacher, so that was really helpful to me. I would tell everyone to go to Taiwan. It’s a really fun place.” As for future plans to go back, Cigas has some ideas. “The military guy that was living with us told me he could see me living in Taiwan,” Cigas said. “So now I really want to live there. But, even if I don’t live there, I would still want to go back.”
Taoyuan, Taiwan Location: southwest of Taipei Population: 2.058 million Time difference: 13 hours Known for: the Pingpu tribe
the Dart | dartnewsonline.com | 11 September 2015