Overseas community project Laos was one of the collaboration projects between the youths in Singapore and the youth union in Laos. The trip was service based as most of the time that we spent there was doing service-related activities. The project was my first project out of my comfort zone, into an unknown land, unknown culture, and people. Without knowing much, I set sail with my group of a mixture of scouting related and non-scouting related friends. The project starts when I attended a talk by one of the retired Temasek Polytechnic lecturer who has settled down in Laos doing an education center for the youths there teaching them English and useful life skills. His intention was hoping that he could attract some businesses to set up base in Laos to help the country develop. I am from Temasek Polytechnic, so I have the privilege to speak to him and through the conversation with him, I get inspired by him and feel that I could do something to help too and, so I asked him for his advice and he gave me a contact information of Laos youth union. After the talk, I met up with my friends who are in the Temasek Polytechnic community involvement club to ask them if we could do something to help the Laotians. After much discussions and exchange of information with Laos youth union, we came up with a plan. The Laos youth union representative, Ms. Moon, shared with us that many Laos schools need proper buildings and walkways and the country is hoping to develop in the tourism sector and forcing citizens to learn English. The plan that we came up was that we could conduct English lessons to train teachers from a cluster of schools and then these teachers will go back to their school and conduct class. The Laos Youth Union will help to gather the teachers and provide the venue. The structure wise we must gage school by school as every school’s needs are different. The cost of the whole project and the individual expenses is not a small amount and we propose the idea and submitted our plan to the Temasek Polytechnic engineering school as the whole team including myself is from engineering school. The good news came just a few days after we submitted our proposal, school have approved our plan and agree to subsidized half of the project. With that, we continued in a further and more detailed discussion and finalized the day to day programs and logistics. With all things ready, we pack our things and set sail. The 10 days project begin with meeting Ms moon where she will be hosting us helping us to settle to the local community and translate for us. The team consists of 27 people including 2 staff that TP sends to supervise and help us. Every day there was class conducted and there was member going out to help the local school in improving their school. The team split up to 2 groups each takes the role of teaching and rebuilding and then rotate. Every night we will meet and discuss/share the happenings and what everyone has gained. Breakdown of the journey: Day 1 Arrived at Night + Stayover at Venetian Day 2 Travelling to Town + Settling down Day 3 Day 1 Teaching + Rebuilding Day 4 Day 2 Teaching + Rebuilding Day 5 Day 3 Teaching + Rebuilding Day 6 (Sat) Visiting Local Market + Rest Day 7 (Sun) Visiting Mekong River + Rest Day 8 Day 4 Teaching + Rebuilding Day 9 Completing the Walkway Day 10 Packing + Leaving The two groups were further divided into 2 subgroups when we reached Laos making 4 teams in total. Teaching team prepared lessons like a basic conversation, email writing, etiquette and Singapore culture for adults. Basic alphabets, colors, greetings, and numbers for children. These lessons were picked after much consideration and prepared before we went over. For adults, with the help of Ms. Moon, we started with culture hoping it will break the ice by playing traditional games like Chap The, 5 stones with them and talking about our racial backgrounds, our religions, and traditional food. After all these the adult students were more willing to work with us by talking with us and sharing their thoughts and viewpoints. We then started on the basic conversation which we teach them commonly used words, phrases, and sentences. We especially pick etiquette as one of the topics as we think that will benefit them especially as Laos government is focusing on tourism, as the people are being politer in society, the coming back rate of tourist might be high as they have a pleasant journey, the local economy will be better. Finally, we touched on email writing. We find this as the most important topic to teach as we think this is the key for them to communicate in the modern world. While the teaching team is teaching, the other 2 groups are getting dirty to help the school that we were teaching building cement walkway with solar power light bulbs. The original idea purposed was to work on a half-completed school building due to lack of funding but once we reached there we find it was too challenging and dangerous as the building is about 3 stories tall and is only about 30precent done. There are many takeaways from this trip/project but the biggest I feel was that the experience that I had as it enhanced my personal growth making me understand the true meaning of volunteering and what servanthood means in rover scouting. After the trip, we must write reflection/report to the school to summaries what we have done and from there the school determines if the trip is worth continuing. The 2 staff that came with us offered to do a presentation of what they have seen to the school directors and volunteered themselves, sacrifice their holiday time to take students over to impact the Laotians and their community. The things that we have done was recorded and was played during TP open house and the project was offered twice a year for TP students and others all year long as long as they are willing to go at their own expenses.