My experience as an SVO Specialist Team member in Bhutan.
Bhutan is a naturally beautiful country with villages nestled in the valleys, people young and old offering warm smiles, its colourful culture and strong Buddhist faith. I was marveled from the moment I set foot on Paro Airport. Surrounded by the beauty of the Himalayas, the Bhutanese lead simple lives but take very seriously, the intricacies of their art and culture. Each home, government building and school is carefully hand-painted with patterns and colours that are unique to Bhutan. Looking at the men in their traditional and national dress known as Gho, one can’t help but to wonder how it has evolved from what it was centuries ago to what it is today.
Working with the Bhutanese was a joy mainly due to their openness in learning new things and level of excitement. Although Bhutan is a developing nation, you will be surprised at the advancements they have made in terms of technology for teaching and learning. At the College of Education, Paro, the school is equipped with Internet connected through satellite and their computer labs are so spacious and warm. Warm in terms of ambience and also literally as they have central heaters for those cold winter days. I fully appreciated the central heater, which was so important during my visit there, as it was the tail end of winter with temperatures falling as low as 6 degrees. It was nice and cozy and “toast-y” too.
Being a part of the SVO Specialist Team was just fantastic. Apart from the chance to visit one of the most beautiful countries of the world and sharing my knowledge on technologies for teaching and learning, the visit taught me and opened my eyes to many things we take for granted daily. The participants, mostly lecturers from College of Education, Paro and Samtse, showed tremendous interest and genuinely wanted to learn as much as possible in order to equip their student teachers with the skills needed to run their IT programmes when they are posted in schools. Though the internet connection was at a speed almost unacceptable to us, the Bhutanese were patient and took things in their stride. Communication was not a problem as most Bhutanese speak English and English is also the language used in schools. The lecturers are also well-informed with many having studied abroad in countries such as Canada, Australia and USA.
My visit there was to impart my knowledge and skills in multimedia design. The industry-certified applications for multimedia authoring today are quite complex as each software is built with many functions to serve all levels of users from beginners to intermediate to experts. As such, one needs to be taught what these functions are, which ones to use and when to use them for different purposes and contexts. I shared with them various tools from complex systems to simple-to-use ones which are available for free. A couple of hands-on workshops were conducted particularly on complex applications such as Adobe Flash multimedia authoring program and Photoshop, a graphic editor program. Besides just teaching the functionalities of the applications, they also learnt ways as to how these applications can be used for creating of materials for teaching and learning.
Overall, it was an enriching experience for me as a volunteer. I was happy that I was able to share my area of work. The Bhutanese hospitality and the SVO team I was with made the whole process, so easy. I have to thank SIF particularly Mr. Ng Yeen Chern for making the visit such a memorable one. Yeen Chern has so much knowledge of Bhutan that one would think he’s a Bhutanese, as echoed by some of the natives we met.
I have definitely grown from this experience, though it was just a short one-week trip. The values and beliefs upheld by the country right down to each individual is so apparent and coupled with their preservation of nature makes Bhutan a magnificent and magical place to visit. If you are up there, have a chat with some of the school children and you will be pleasantly surprised by their charming accent, lovely smile and eloquence in holding a conversation at such a young age. Heavenly!
Cheers, mazlan.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Hopefully I’ll find a site soon so I can share all my pictures with you beautiful people.
