Prepare for Impact!

By Jason Cho 

From super early Monday seven a.m. sessions to hungry Thursday lunch meetings, our Impact team is finally ready to create a joyful experience for the kids in Johor Bahru!

Impact trips have only one purpose… To make an impact, of course! This year, students were given the opportunity to sign up for multiple service trips: Johor Bahru, Perak, Indonesia, and North Borneo. I decided to list Johor Bahru as our first choice; soon, I was able to redeem my choice and begin my journey to prepare for the upcoming service trip. Each impact trip was designated to a specific place; in our case of Johor Bahru, we would be traveling to the Rohingya Refugee School & Center to offer education and service through English learning activities. 

Preparing for the Impact trip was not a hard process but more of an exciting experience. Although the early morning pre-trip training sessions were truly excruciating for me as a senior with senioritis, they were still memorable experiences. We spent time planning out the activities and coordinating each so the kids would be given the utmost opportunity to learn English and have fun. I was stationed in the game section for this upcoming trip, and since we had to do activities relating to English words, we chose to do pictionary, charades, and musical chairs. But we also added activities like soccer at the end so that the kids have some extra fun at the end of each service. 

Brendan Loke (12), one of the seniors for the impact trip to Johor, stated, “My hope is to empower and interact with people who do not come from the same privileged background that we are from, and to share the knowledge that I’ve been so lucky to have been given the opportunity to have access to.”

Serving these kids is our main priority for this trip, but also for us as students to learn the qualities of FLOSSing. Oh, not the dance moves! I meant Flexibility, Learner, Observant, Sacrificial, and Servant. As Dalat students, we are blessed to have the environment and atmosphere that this school has given us, but this opportunity is unquestionably excluded from many others worldwide. Through this Impact trip, we hope to grow both as a servant and a learner, being observant of other people’s cultures and being flexible throughout positive and negative situations placed upon us. It is not only a temporary service trip but a treasured memory and lesson we will gain for the rest of our lives. 

I pray that our Impact team can travel and accomplish our service without any troubles, and I wish the other teams the best of luck!