Kate's in Korea: Reaching My Goals

This past week bore several mile markers of my time in Korea. First, I survived my 100th day in Korea and secondly, I attended our first Fulbright Conference of the year in Gyeongju. Both of these events highlighted just how quickly my year is progressing. While listening to music on my ride home, I reflected on the lyrics of Modest Mouse "the years go fast and the days go so slow". This line is very fitting for my time in South Korea. Every day is very enjoyable and full of surprises but my days are still routine and therefore never seem to be flying by. Yet, when I reflect on my time in Korea as a whole it seems like my plan landed only a week ago.

These milestones really awoke me to the brevity of my time in Hwacheon and South Korea. It really forced me to consider whether or not I was meeting my goals for my year in South Korea. I can honestly say I am pleased with my ability to travel and feel like I have seen a lot of South Korea, although there is always more to see. Luckily, I have numerous more trips planned for this semester and for my winter break.

One of the areas that I feel like I still need to focus on is developing relationships with the people around me, particularly my co-workers. I really want to leave South Korea feeling like I impacted people here and feeling like I have strong friendships with several Koreans. Obviously, language is the main impediment to me reaching this goal. On my bus ride I was reflecting on what further efforts I could make to reach out to my Korean co-workers and was gearing up to make some changes on Tuesday. Oddly enough on Tuesday I made a lot of progress towards my goal through no effort of my own. After classes I was walking to the cafeteria to make some tea when two of the special education teachers spotted me and called for me to enter their room. Neither of the teachers spoke any English besides "Hi, my name is..." but I understood their request for me to sit. I then sat on the floor and talked to their student while the two teachers giggled a lot in Korea and continued cooking 해물파전 (seafood pancakes/pajeon) on a hot plate on the floor. They then urged me to sit at the table and served me two huge pieces of pajeon. The women sat with me and we drank tea and talked in broken Korean while I ate. One of the teachers then mentioned that she had a daughter who was also 22 and immediately proceeded to call her daughter. I then spoke to her daughter on the phone and discovered that her mom had been excited to meet me for a long time but was scared to approach me since she does not speak English. This comment really made me reflect on how my co-workers and I are facing the same battle.

My co-workers have always been so friendly towards me and genuinely express concern for my well-being, mainly through my co-teacher Soo Jin. I also really care about my co-workers and share their same desire to get to know each other on a deeper level. While eating pajeon and drinking tea with my two co-workers I realized how meaningful it is to just be present. During the hour and a half I chatted and sat with these two teachers there were numerous times we all just had to laugh because we were unable to communicate through language. Yet, that laughter was just a different form of communication and I truly feel closer to these teachers. Additionally, I engaged with two other teachers who speak very little English but dropped by the room because I was in there. I then made separate plans with both teachers to meet later in the week to talk more in English. They promised to teach me some Korean in return. One of the two teachers actually came by my classroom today and helped me hang up my student's work while I taught him what the students were working on. We hung up my students' dream meals, while naming all the different foods in Korean and English. It was a really special bonding moment despite the language barrier.

With renewed drive from the Gyeongju Conference, I am eager to continue to pursue my goal of forming lasting relationships with my co-workers and this week taught me an important lesson on how that can be done. I realized I should stop worrying about not being able to speak to my co-teachers because just being in their presence can form bonds and facilitate a different type of communication.

And a blog post is not complete without some pictures so here are some of the sights I saw in Gyeongju.