The Fourth Collegiate Social Responsibility Summer Camp opened on July 29th, 2013.
The ceremony mainly covered two parts. Firstly, the Director of CIBE, Professor Liu Baocheng, gave an opening speech introducing the history and objectives of the summer camp, as well as its initiator, CIBE. He concluded by giving a warm welcome to all the campers.
We then came into the second part: interaction with foreign students who taught English voluntarily at rural primary schools in Nanpi. Next, we were divided into six groups; each group containing one foreign student; in our case it was Lucy. We had five minutes for internal discussion for each question asked by the host. We were then asked to write down the answer on different colored paper and to choose two representatives to give speeches to the others. Questions covered several areas, mainly, the difference between Eastern and Western culture, the importance of voluntary activities, the requirements of a professional man, the gap between the ideal and actual university life, and so on.
Initially the students were a little nervous, mainly due to the lack of experience or confidence in communicating with foreigners. However, as time progressed, the relaxed atmosphere encouraged everyone to become more engaged. Through the exchange of ideas on social life and academic experience with peers from different cultural background, we succeeded in widening our horizons and in turn began to consider them as our new friends, which was also constructive for the following camp activities. |
