Reflecting on Multicultural Relations in the Community Outreach Programme

The community outreach programme (COP) is one of the service-learning programmes in Petra Christian University involving many students from the university and abroad. The programme sends these students to live and conduct community developments in small villages in Indonesia. When I became a field supervisor of the COP in 2010 and 2016, I became aware of the multicultural relations among the students and the community. Although the COP mostly focuses on improving community welfare in terms of education, income, sanitation, etc., there are always multiple processes of cultural learning. This article is based on my experiences and personal reflections, supported by data through reflection review, field observation, informal interviews and interactions with the students and the community. For students, a multicultural environment not only provides different experiences but also life lessons in interacting with especially rural communities. Living within the community made the students more empathetic. In turn, the community mostly felt positive about the impact of the programme, which is real and substantial, and the unforgettable moments of interactions with international students. These multicultural relations reveal values of respecting other cultures, developing attitudes, and broadening beliefs between the students and the community.