The Road to Cambodia

One evening, the smell of pizza wafts through the air in classroom 2202 of the Teaching Building at Taipei Medical University (TMU). The TMU FLYoung International Service organization is holding a meeting to explain its overseas missions for the summer of 2025.

A tradition of service

There is a high level of participation in service-­oriented societies at TMU. The school has more than ten such groups, including both domestic and overseas teams.

FLYoung, for example, won a high distinction award for overseas volunteer groups from the Ministry of Education’s Youth Development Administration in 2024. Since joining the Taiwan Universities Service Overseas program in 2003, when it sent a team to Malawi, ­FLYoung has expanded its service efforts to other countries including Eswatini and Nepal, and has continued this work uninterrupted to the present day. 

Gino Guo, faculty advisor to FLYoung, notes that students at TMU consider it a matter of course to volunteer outside the campus. Many older students have set an excellent example and the tradition of volunteering has been passed down from year to year.

FLYoung has an established tradition of providing services beyond the campus. Shown here, from left to right, are the group’s faculty advisor Gino Guo along with past team leaders and assistant leaders Wu Min-hui, Chen Yu-chen, and Natalie Lin. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Improving nutrition

During the 2025 winter break, following a week spent in Cambodia’s second largest city, Krong Siem Reap, teaching seed teachers about various public health issues, during their second week the FLYoung team went to Battambang Province in the country’s northwest to offer training workshops to primary school principals brought together by the local educational authorities. They then visited local elementary schools to measure students’ height and weight and record their physical development.

Gino Guo says that based on data collected over the years by TMU, when compared with World Health Organization standards, as many as 30–50% of students in Cambodia show signs of severe malnutrition. This is perhaps the result of poor local sanitary conditions or of consuming food of low nutritional value and a lack of dietary diversity. 

Team leader Wu Min-hui compares their situation with her own childhood. When she was in sixth grade, she was already 150 centimeters tall. But when they measured the height of children in Cambodia, half the students in sixth grade were only 130 cm tall. Nonetheless, during the team’s twice-yearly visits, when she sees the children rushing out to greet the team and how their growth has improved, she feels very happy.

An instructor teaches proper tooth-brushing techniques to primary-school children in Battambang Province, Cambodia. 

An instructor gives members of a Cambodian acrobatics troupe guidance on how to avoid injuries. 

Meaningful activities

Chen Yu-chen, who was assistant team leader for the 2025 winter break service team in Cambodia, mentions that in class the students asked questions enthusiastically. Their feedback gave her greater encouragement to put into practice what she has learned in school and extend the heartfelt emotional connections made through FLYoung’s work into the future.

FLYoung also has been conducting a wound care project, with participants demonstrating techniques for properly disinfecting and dressing wounds. Natalie Lin, who has been to Cambodia as a volunteer four times and is currently a graduate student in the Institute of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at National Taiwan University, states that while in Taiwan it is taken for granted that schools will have an infirmary or nurse’s office, in Cambodia it’s a different story. There, when a child has a cut or graze everyone assumes they will be OK, but in fact their wounds frequently become infected. 

Sean Lin, a fourth-year student in the TMU School of Dentistry, shares the following thought: When he is 80 and thinks back to what he did over his summer and winter vacations at university, he will remember that when he taught an emotional management class to seed teachers in Cambodia, he was able to apply the “nervous system” theory that he learned in his third year at TMU. “I’ll be glad to have done something meaningful and memorable while I was still young.” 

The students’ enthusiastic participation during classes gives the volunteer teachers a strong sense of accomplishment.