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. 

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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.

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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.)