Publication date:October 17, 2018
Publisher:Youth Development Administration
Coordinator: Chun-Fan Wu
Telephone/Mobile phone:0988-225304/02-77365583
E-mail:chunfanwu@mail.yda.gov.tw
Contact person for the press: Section director, Rong-Mang Ma
Telephone/Mobile phone:02-7736-5579/0912-830696
This is the 11th year of "Youth Travel in Taiwan – Exploring Love with The Map Program" campaign, which is held by the Youth Development Administration of Ministry of Education. This year, in 2018, there are more than 200 young participants, who have walked outdoor with us, looked for extraordinary sceneries in Taiwan, and also combined their own expertise to convert the remote country areas, meanwhile, shortened the urban-rural divide.
Li Qi-Fang, who grew up in Sweili, Nantou, is a member of the "O!BAY CHIE Handmade Dessert" team. During the school year, he was benefited from the enlightenment of teachers from different fields. After graduation, he set up his own dessert studio through serendipity. This is the third year he and his friends made good use of the low business season to drive the mobile snack bar to the remote country areas for baking tutorials. The car is always full of ingredients, tools and equipment every time they hit the road. Moreover, they will always drive with friends from different fields, who work as a barista, dance teacher, handicraft teacher to support the talent courses’ demand of local schools. This year, Li Qi-Fang and professional photographer, Gu Xin-Ru, as well as a group of friends who support the same mission, they applied for this program as a team and purposed their idea of “Sweet Dessert Car”. They went to Dingzhuang elementary school in the south of Zhuoshui River in Changhua and Danlu tribes in Taitung to conduct remote area teaching. This theme had raised the learning restriction to the children on environmental factors and had enlightened them with the versatile interests.
"Is it a disadvantage to grow up in a remote countryside?" Li Qi-Fang often asked himself. In fact, the local schools aren’t necessarily lacking of funds or hardware equipment, their challenge is to recruit teachers due to the distant geography. Therefore, they thought of using the mobile snack bar as a medium to shorten the distance between urban and rural areas and turning it into a bridge that connects both rural and urban’s habit of diet and cultures. The ingredients for handmade desserts are all produced locally from the remote towns. With the exchanging of resources, children from rural areas are able to have baking practical experiences; meanwhile, the education purpose of teaching the children to appreciate the characteristics and advantages of the local agriculture is also precious. After several baking, drawing, dancing, writing and storytelling classes, regardless of how naughty and naive those children were, they all become the children with ambitions, creativities, curiosities, possibilities, energy, and dreams.
Li Qi-Fang told us that there are many children from kinship care or single-parent families around the countryside and most of them are less likely to be companioned after school because their parents are busy with their work out of town. With the help of the mobile snack bar, the children are able to experience versatile in their own towns, which not