Roughly one year ago to this day I was in Taiwan marching through a swamp barefooted with mud up to my waist and singing songs in a Taiwanese dialect that I didn’t understand. I was with my friends, my students, and a tour guide who seemed to get a kick out of getting the Americans covered in mud. The swamp was a short drive away from the school I was teaching at, and this was one of the many field trips I attended during my stay in Mudan.

I spent the summer of 2017 voluntarily teaching English to junior high school students in Taiwan. I worked through Assisting Individuals in Disadvantage (AID), a program that sent international students with Taiwanese ancestry to various low-income communities to teach English to elementary and junior high school students. I was one of the dozens of students selected to participate in this program, and to this day it’s still one of the best experiences of my life.

I was sent to Mudan Township Junior High School. Located halfway up a mountain in a rural area of Pingtung, Taiwan, this school was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It was surrounded by greenery everywhere you looked, there was only one restaurant within 5 miles of the school, and above all, every student was bursting with energy.

Learning to work with my students was the most challenging part of my summer. I was warned by my advisors that my students weren’t going to be the best students in an academic sense. After giving my first lesson at the school, I understood what they meant. The students were bright, talented, and energetic. However, I could tell that their infinite storages of energy weren’t anywhere to be found in a traditional Taiwanese classroom where a teacher lectures, and the students don’t talk at all. They couldn’t wait for the sound of the bell to let them know that they could go outside and play sports and play guitar and piano until the next lecture began. After my first day of lessons, I went back to my accommodation and revised every lesson plan I had for the rest of the summer.

Every lesson I had from there on out was radically different from the first day’s. Every lesson involved games relating to the topic which let my students run, team up, and talk as loudly as they ever wanted to. It took some time for my students to warm up to the idea since they never experienced playing games in a classroom setting, but once they did, they were as energetic inside the classroom as they were outside of it. More importantly, I could tell that they were learning English and having fun doing it.

Outside of school hours, I played a lot of basketball with my students, learning to grow my relationship with them through mutual interests. Finding our mutual love of sports helped me break down the barriers between my students and I, and I’ll never forget that. Beyond playing basketball, I also explored Taiwan’s countryside. I got to wade through swamps, snorkel in the ocean, and eat stinky tofu at night markets. I was fully immersed in Taiwanese culture every day, and I got to learn tons about myself, my family’s background, and this beautiful country in just a couple of months.

During the summer of 2017 I made lifelong friends with my teaching partners and students, explored a country and its culture more in depth than I ever had before, and learned valuable lessons in how to communicate and how to connect with people from all sorts of backgrounds. As cliché as it sounds, that summer was a life changing experience that I’ll always be grateful for.