For many young people, spring break in Cancun sounds exotic. But one recent graduate dedicated many weeks of her college vacations much farther away. An interest in the peoples of Asia and a particular commitment to the Chinese led Cammie Brennan ’05 to China two of the last three summers. She will return to China in the fall to teach conversational English at the university level. But this time around, she says something has changed. Cammie plans to do more than just teach. She plans to learn.

Brennan, who graduated with a bachelor of arts in comparative religion and Asian studies, has been fascinated by Asia since she was a child. After her family hosted a Japanese exchange student while she was in the fourth grade, Cammie became “obsessed with Asia.” Finally, in junior high she made her first journey across the Pacific when she visited a former exchange student in Japan with her sister Katherine Brennan Homiak ’02. After another trip in high school and further exposure as a first-year student at Jewell, Cammie decided to teach English in Japan. But in an effort to find something to do for a summer, she went to China for five weeks to teach English as part of a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship program.

“The children’s teachers have taught them a lot of reading, writing and grammar, but there’s not a lot of conversational English taught,” Cammie said. “So it’s kind of fun to see them put the pieces together from what they’ve learned and what I’m teaching them.”

Last summer Brennan returned to China with the help of the nonprofit Volunteers for China, which was founded by former CBF volunteer coordinator Ann Wilson and her husband David.Wilson
said the volunteers travel to China not to evangelize, but to provide Christian service. They teach English and culture, not theology.

“Chinese people will have a better life if they speak English,” she said. “We are in China legitimately as teachers.” Brennan said VFC does more than just teach English. It promotes a cultural exchange.

“They are promoting a good relationship between China and the West, and in particular,Christians in the West,” she said. Cammie serves as an excellent resource for such an exchange, according to Wilson: “Cammie has a way of reaching out to people who are different and making them feel very comfortable. That is probably her strongest point. She is very effective in China because of her compassion, because of her caring for people.”

Although she is uncertain what the next ten years may bring, Cammie plans to continue reaching out. In September she will begin teaching conversational English at Hangzhou Normal University in Hangzhou, China, where she will also volunteer with Global Women, an organization dedicated to ending sex trafficking.

Wilson believes Cammie’s call to service should be an example for others.“We need to expect that it is a perfectly normal thing for college students to go on a mission out of the country. It should be something we expect of our young people,” Wilson said. “We should support them and encourage them to do it, so God can enrich their lives and give them direction.”

For the Brennans, commitment to service and exposure to foreign cultures has simply been a way of life. “I grew up in a home where we had a lot of foreign visitors and were open to different cultures,” Cammie said.

But it is because of her experience at Jewell, particularly the General Education and religion courses she took, that Cammie said her outlook has developed further: “I feel like there’s a difference between the me who wanted to go to Asia before high school as a crusader bringing the truth and bringing the word, and the one who’s leaving Jewell with high hopes that somehow the Chinese people and I can make something new or something better together. I know we can both learn from each other.”