12A Aladar Miao 苗弘力
Honestly, I was surprised by the immense hospitality the community exudes throughout the whole time when I lived in Udon Thani. The locals themselves: the children at school, those who sell goods at the supermarket, the monk, the man who we set up fishing nets for, the woman who we planted rice for, again, indiscriminately every single one of them treated us like we were their own children. I was flabbergasted. If everyone in this world possesses such hospitality and friendliness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. An epiphany struck me like lightning: assistance is only the smaller part of this trip. This trip is mostly about experiencing the lives of local residents instead of actually aiding them.

9A Eugene Eun 殷在賢
I was born so privileged. From small, being the only child and being born in such a modern country like Taiwan, I was fed the best food, I was surrounded by the best environment, I was educated the best way in local schools. This is what blinded me from a lot of the things out there in the real world. In Thailand, many houses are made out of bricks, and some of them are even just made out of scraps. While I had ferroconcrete walls in my room, they had sheets of blanket to cover them from wind and rain. While I had a lot of teachers to take care of me and educate me properly, the schools there overflowed with students, yet having around one teacher per subject which resulted in insufficient education. Through this realization, I told myself to live helping others. Because I was born with a lot, I feel like it’s my duty to give back and live helping people.

9B Yun-Jung Tseng曾韻融
“This man has had cancer for the last three months,” our counselor informed us, not once taking his eyes off a man who seemed to be literally comprised of skin and bones. There was not an ounce of flesh visible—he really looked like a beige-colored skeleton straight out of a biology textbook, and his knobbed joints stuck out at odd angles. “He means to tell you that he is not afraid of his fate, something we all know will reveal itself within the next month,” our counselor translated of us, his voice solemn.
The only thing I could think of the entire time was of how unfair it was that while we, the people born with more advantages fretted about following the latest trends, or which celebrity had been wearing/seen with what, when there were people all over the world who had much more serious problems at hand. But we don’t notice them. We are all too busy wrapped up in our own worlds, dealing with our own (considerably less important) problems that we manage to neglect how there are actually people out there in desperate need of help.

11A Jasmine Perng彭宇婕
The natives and the students rarely communicated, yet just by witnessing their everyday lives and the hardships they endure, it reminded me that my sugar-coated life was more than enough. In Udon Thani, most of the people we met came from a hardworking and challenging background. Till this day, they still work just as hard to attain their goals, with the joy and content of their efforts driving their motivation for working hard every day. The determination and commitment that these people put into their work has immensely moved me to cherish all that I have and value the right things. To say that they lived an unorthodox life would be wrong; to say that they lived a sequestered life would be wrong; for their lives were imbued with their own complexity of happiness. This experience has refined my understanding of happiness and hard work. Seven days of simplicity and humbleness has made me realize that I can be happy—even happier—without the exorbitant lifestyle that I live here in the city.

9A Alan Wu 吳東庭
I can still remember all the moments that touched me. One thing was planting rice in the fields. From this experience i was able to grasp the difficult life of a farmer planting rice. After only 2 hours my back was sore I was begging for a break. Soon after i found out that the woman we were planting for does this 8 hours each day. 8 hours a day of that tiring work gave me a new appreciation for these people. specially since I learned they only make roughly 100NT a day for that strenuous labor. This experience gave me new light on how people are living their lives because I was able to enter the homes of the unfortunate. I heard the stories of their lives and their culture. It was truly an experience that is very rare to come across.

9A Ting-Yun Chen 陳庭筠
Throughout the trip, our community service group learned to communicate with locals, ask them about their daily life, and learn more about Thai culture. We learned a little Thai language to communicate with Thai locals, basic rules about the majority religion in Thailand, Buddhism, and the special foods they eat, such as frogs, crickets, grasshoppers, and silk worms. While giving food to the people in need, I saw several people who really needed help but weren’t wealthy enough to buy their own needs. There was one of who we helped that I will never forget, he was an old man who had cancer but wasn’t afraid of dying. Through asking locals questions, we learned that most Thai people don't see death as a sorrowful thing because they believed in afterlife. This trip also taught us to respect, cherish the things we have, and be a humble person.

10B Ethan Wang王一參
What started off as a simple trip that I didn’t expect would impact me in any way became an embedded memory that I’ll never let go of. The man before he got onto the plane to Bangkok and the man on the plane back to Taiwan are completely different people. What once was a simple minded boy who had no consideration or perspective of those who were less fortunate swirled around into a realized mind of a man who understood the hardships and what such acts by community service organizations meant to these people. It taught this boy what it truly meant to be grateful and appreciative for what we had, what it meant to be hustling, and what it meant to be less fortunate.

9B Young Lin 林芷暘
One morning, we woke up early to buy food and ingredients in a local market. It took us the whole morning just to cook and pack the food. After we finally finished doing so, we went around the village giving out food. I felt wonderful every time I passed out the food because it feels like I really helped out someone.

9A Yvonne Kuo 郭正怡
Never in my wildest dreams have I ever imagined that community service could be such a rewarding experience. I have never met such enthusiastic kids before. Even though we had a language barrier, they tried their best to understand what we were saying and yelled on the top of their lungs while repeating the vocabulary words. Through this event, we learned more about the daily lives of the locals and also interacted with them. After doing service in Udon Thani, my views on community service changed drastically.

9B Jason Perng 彭宇凡
The project fish farms was challenging for us to do. First we went to get baby cat fish so we could put them in the fish farms and raise them until they grow big, most of them would be sold in a market and the rest are eaten by the poor villagers. This project is challenging because we had to make the fish farm out of raw material, we had to get the right length of the wood, and we need to have enough strength to hammer the nails in the wood. The last step is taking the fish farm into the pond and hammer nails into bamboo into wood in the water. The trip to Thailand was an amazing experience for me. After the service trip to Thailand, I want to go to more of these kinds of trips.

9B Tiffany Kuo郭正婷
Teaching and Tutoring was one of the first things we did. It was a blast! Our group, which was Alan, Ting, Julia, and Yunjung, was assigned to the loving 4th graders.We had to teach them They were so sweet and cute. They were really interested of what they were going to learn. This was an experience I will probably never forget. All the nice people, their smiling faces, everything. Thank you Thailand.