From February 3-10, a Yonsei “Dream Expedition” team volunteered in Kathmandu, Nepal.  Supervised by Professor Song In-han (Graduate School of Social Welfare), the thirteen undergraduate volunteers visited local schools and orphanages, while representatives from the Graduate School of Social Welfare discussed academic exchanges and social welfare policies with Nepalese officials.  
In their visits to local schools, the Yonsei team members taught Nepalese students how to write their name in Korean, while making bouncing balls with them and building structures using only spaghetti strands and marshmallows.  They also gave demonstrations of the K-Pop “Pa-pa-pa” dance and classical Korean dance.  At the Safalta HIV SikshyaSadan orphanage for HIV-infected orphans, the volunteer team performed their motivational play “Dog Poop” in Nepalese.      According to Kim Gwang-yeon, the student team leader of the“Dream Expedition”:“It was not easy to prepare a performance in Nepalese, which I do not speak, but the volunteer experience was very rewarding, as I was able to take part in planting seeds of new hope for the children.”
Representatives of the Graduate School of Social Welfare also took the opportunity to discuss establishing academic exchanges with the School of Arts at Kathmandu University, and they spoke with officials from the Nepalese Department of Health Services about strategies for developing cooperative social welfare policies.
The purpose of the “Dream Expedition” volunteer program is to give Yonsei students the opportunity to help improve the quality of life for disabled and underprivileged youths in the Asia Social Welfare Belt (ASWB), which includes nations such as Mongolia, Vietnam, and Nepal.  For this year’s trips to Vietnam (January 9-16) and Nepal, the Yonsei Volunteer Center selected twenty-six students last October who had either successfully completed two social volunteer courses or who had performed more than sixty hours of volunteer work.  The successful applicants were then chosen for their passion, devotion, and sense of duty; and to prepare for the trips, they received extensive training, including language courses in Vietnamese or Nepalese.  The Volunteer Center will continue to send student volunteers abroad in the future, with the goal of planting Yonsei’s values overseas.