Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

Once a week I teach a night class.

My students are officers on an Army base and will have to give a formal military briefing at the end of the course. To prepare them to give a speech in English, we start our evening classes with 2 students giving speeches.

In my class of 10, one of the students is a chaplain. In spite of my preconceived, ill-conceived expectations, he is turning out to be one of the most interesting people in the class. Maybe the school.

He chose as his topic to explain why he became a chaplain. When he told me the topic, I had to struggle not to roll my eyes. <-- Foolish me.

When he was in college he joined a 'charity work club'. The group raised money and rented a building for poor kids to study in in a poor part of Seoul where families of 5 or more were living in one room. More than a thousand people were living on a mountain-side with only 4 toilets and one well for everyone to share. The college students also offered tutoring to the kids in the study room.

A construction company bought up the land and ordered the people out. My student joined the demonstrations against the company, but they failed to stop the development.

Anyway, my student met the mother of two of his students. She and the boys had been living with her in-laws for 10 years while the husband was working in Saudi Arabia for the money. The husband's brother was involved in a car accident and and they had to spend all the money the family had saved on medical bills. A few months after my student met her, she died of liver cancer. She'd been treated for three years for a stomach disorder but had been misdiagnosed.

My student decided to become a pastor because he wanted to understand why people suffer such awful, undeserved fates and in order to help when he could.

(I'm going to try to get him to write this story up for An Ajosshi's Story, but he isn't a strong student or writer.)

Before the second speech, the student gave a news announcement. He said a Korean soldier was killed in Afghanistan in a suicide attack. (http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2872911)

The gasps were audible. I asked if this was the first casualty and the student said, "Yes". Another student turned to me and said, "It's the first one they've admitted to."

This is why I choose to work with adults. In a month of teaching, I have not once heard, "I play computer game."