In October of this year, a group of 13 pupils of Geschwister-Scholl-Gesamtschule, a comprehensive school in Dortmund, went on a ten-day trip to Singapore as part of their Chinese language course. This gave the young people an opportunity to get to know the Asian metropolis, its culture and way of life. Making a trip to a Chinese-speaking country has been an integral part of the school’s study trip programme since 2006. It supports the key objective of the school’s Chinese classes, namely to deepen pupils’ intercultural and communication skills through personal encounters with Chinese-speaking youth.

The study trip was supported by the Wilo-Foundation (here: as a trustee of the WILO-Stiftung). As part of its regional responsibility for young people in Dortmund, the foundation also supports encounters that promote international understanding and, in this context, provides grants to selected schools from Dortmund. These grants help schools cover the travel costs that arise when pupils travel abroad to meet their partner schools and develop their intercultural, language and social skills.

During the trip, the pupils paid their Singaporean partner school a visit, went on a tour of the city along Marina Bay and visited the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre. On 14 October, they also spent several hours at the Wilo Office in Singapore. Eva Kerstholt (Group Director Sales Area Southeast Asia & Managing Director Wilo Malaysia) took the opportunity to welcome the pupils personally. She gave them a detailed overview of Wilo’s activities in southeast Asia and also shared many personal impressions of her daily work there, highlighting the differences and similarities between her working life in Germany and in southeast Asia, and also spoke about the southeast Asian culture. During an evening event after the journey, the pupils talked about their experiences and encounters in Singapore, emphasising that the visit to the Wilo Office and their meeting with Eva Kerstholt had been one of the major highlights of the journey.