Monday, January 13, 2014

volunteering at Mulmangcho School (물망초학교)

(photo cred goes to Joo Yeon Cho and Casey Lartigue: I ripped most of these photos from their Facebooks!)

On Sunday, I had the amazing opportunity to go volunteer with North Korean refugees at Mulmangcho School (물망초학교) in Yeoju. I found out about this service opportunity on my favorite site...Meetup! (This Meetup is organized by Casey Lartigue, Director of International Relations at Freedom Factory Co. Ltd.)

On Sunday morning, I took the subway to meet the group at 9am at Express Bus Terminal, and then we took a bus for about an hour and a half to get to Yeoju. From there, we were picked up in a van and we had about a 15-minute ride out to the school. 



------------------------------------

I'm going to give a little summary of the back story that Casey told us about this school and how the children arrived there before I jump into the details of the volunteer day.

The children who live and study at this school have escaped from North Korea by way of China. Some of them are orphans, but others have one parent or rarely, both. The school's top priority is to take in orphans, because they are in the most need. The teachers live at the school with the kids, and not only teach the kids, but feed and take care of them as well. On the weekdays, the kids are taught general subjects; on Saturdays, they are taught art, music, and dance; and on Sundays, the volunteers come to teach them English. The goal is to help the kids get up to speed on their education (since they were under-educated or not educated at all in North Korea) and help them transition to living in South Korea.

------------------------------------
Mulmangcho (물망초) means "forget-me-not" in Korean, so we were given these little pins with forget-me-nots on them on our way out to the school.



Here we are!



When we arrived, we met Professor Park, who works at the school and is a professor of constitutional law at Dogok University. She and her mother and a few other women who work at the school served us some wonderful snacks right when we got there...that was so nice of them! 






Professor Park talked to us about the school and introduced us to one of the students who had just arrived a few months ago. 

Here we are: the volunteers, Professor Park (the woman in the black hat), and the young woman who had recently arrived from North Korea (in the red and navy coat).



We split up into two groups: two of the ladies worked with the girl pictured above, and the rest of us went to work with the other five kids, who were a bit younger. One of the volunteers who has been coming for about a year had prepared some materials for class with vocabulary words about winter, so we used the worksheets she had brought as a mini-lesson for the kids.

Here we are working one-on-one with the adorable little ones!





This little guy was my buddy! He repeated every word I said in English, and sometimes he would just look at me and laugh! 



We were cut a little short on our teaching time, because the people who work at the school invited us to join them for lunch! They had prepared a beautiful lunch for everyone, and we got to eat together and talk with the kids a bit more. One of the volunteers, a woman from Japan, had brought some little gifts for the kids on her most recent trip to Japan, so after lunch she handed out the gifts and we helped the kids open them up and assemble them.

Look at my little friend on the far right in the red coat! He was sassy!




Here we are with the kids and Professor Park, saying goodbye:



As we were leaving, the kids started up with this adorable little song and dance!






If anyone in Korea is interested in volunteering with this awesome program, you can contact Casey Lartigue at cjl@post.harvard.edu (other contact info below), or via the Meetup site (search for "Volunteering for North Korean Refugees"). It was such a meaningful and fun experience!



(I'm sure there are some things that I misunderstood about the school, the kids' previous experiences, or the way the program works. Even though I'm sure my account here wasn't perfect or very thorough, I hope it gave everyone just a sense of the kind of restorative work that is being done with North Korean refugees for the sake of justice and peace.)

Sunday, January 5, 2014

let's learn Korean!

Happy New Year, everyone :)

On the first Saturday of 2014, I went to a free Korean class in Seoul! I have been learning Korean little by little on my own since last summer, but this class is my first official attempt at gaining some proficiency in Korean.



I found out about this free class on Meetup! It takes place at Bangbae Culture Center in Bangbae-dong on Saturdays, for two hours each time, for ten weeks.



The website said that the basic level was for those who want to start with learning the Korean alphabet, and the 1A level was for those who want to begin learning basic grammar. I had already taught myself the Korean alphabet last summer using a couple of YouTube videos (here and here), so I thought I could skip the basic level and start at 1A. I arrived at the 1A class at 11am on Saturday morning, where I met several American students, a student from Nigeria, and our Korean teacher. Our teacher asked us to introduce ourselves using only Korean, which was my first clue that I would be in over my head if I started at the 1A level. After we did our introductions (mostly in English, haha!), the teacher proceeded to review content from the previous level. I didn't know any of the phrases or grammar structures that he was reviewing, which gave me further reason to believe that I should come back for the basic class that afternoon. The last bit of confirmation for this decision came when we took a "level test" at the end of the class. I knew about three of the vocabulary words on the test (비행기, airplane; 우유, milk; and 바나나, banana) and absolutely failed the rest of it. After class, I and two other students decided that we would move to the basic class because we just didn't know enough to stay on at the 1A level.

This left three hours to spend between the 1A class and the basic class, so I decided to go to my favorite 만두 (dumpling) place in Dongdaemun and walk around a bit. I came across Dongdaemun History and Culture Park, which I hadn't been to before; it was such a beautiful and peaceful place!





I believe this is Haechi, the mascot of Seoul. (Korean friends, correct me if I'm wrong!) This "statue" was made from plastic bottles, cups, and bowls!



  This mural was on a storefront across from Dongdaemun History and Culture Park. Isn't it sweet? ^^


At 4pm I returned to Bangbae Culture Center for the basic level class. The students in this class were from all over the world! There were about seven or eight students from India, three Americans, one man from Rwanda, and one woman from Australia. The teacher was very effective and taught us the alphabet and about 15 vocabulary words in just two hours! I'm really glad I decided to start from the beginning at the basic level.

Here is our textbook, starting from the very beginning.



Class notes from the first day.



Class activity: vocabulary word search and writing practice.





My homework for the week is to copy the alphabet on grid paper and study for a vocabulary test next week. Wish me luck!

For those interested in learning a few Korean phrases:

안녕하세요 an nyoung ha say yo means "hello"
감사합니다 kam sa hap ni da means "thank you"
커피 ko pi means "coffee"
화장실 hwa jang shil means "restroom"

What more do you need to know? ;)