a glimpse of Africa, and other travels

So I'm a bit behind the times, but my friend Jimmie has finally updated his blog with some images from Sudan, and I wanted to put a link here for anyone interested in seeing some great photos. Jimmie, a college buddy and photographer extraordinare, is documenting church construction in Sudan for Samaritan's Purse. Read more about his work on his blog.

In other news, I'm heading for Beijing next week for the Chinese New Year ... but also now skipping over to Japan for a few days this weekend. Most of our vacation falls around the winter sessions, so I'm cramming a lot of my travel into these couple months. Pictures and posts to come.

Meanwhile it's been back to the routines of teaching and living in the Village, wrangling with Korean studies and boisterous kids, and the exquisite torture of making Asian children say "parallelogram" (I've been teaching math this session).

On Sunday I helped chaperone a field trip to an indoor amusement park of blow-up slides, playgrounds and obstacle courses, and then to ice skate, with meals and other logistics throughout. It was enjoyable - if not easy - extra money, but also a case study in how kid-oriented this country is. Being out in public with 37 random children, it's really clear how much people here seem to view child-rearing as a collective endeavor. Any child is everybody's child - and people go out of their way to talk with, comfort or chastise any little one in their vicinity as they see fit. In our case, many of them did their best to do all that in English, which really is a heroic effort.

It's a marked difference from the States, where many people do their best to avoid public interaction with unknown children - not without reason.

For one thing, Americans have many more fears of pedophilia and other improprieties involving children and strangers. No one knows the actual rates of such crimes in either country, but (like most crimes) it's reported far more in the United States, and people are generally less worried about it in Korea.

For another thing, Americans tend to more support the right of parents to choose how their children are raised, and to criticize anyone who would interfere that. In Korea, people may have just as strong opinions about the way things should be done - though I'd doubt it - but they will rarely contradict a senior person (in rank or age) about anything, and group harmony is far more important than individual freedoms.

And in a less concrete influence, but perhaps the greatest one, Korean culture seems to prize childhood more as a golden era, and Korean people tend to go to far greater lengths to ensure their children the most opportunities and enjoyment. It's not uncommon for parents here to work dawn to dusk to afford to send their children to the best private institutes for English and other skills. They push their children hard, but they also devote a lot of energy to making sure the kids have fun and are happy, both in daily life and weekend activities.

But I don't think this group effort to raise children happens only here (though I imagine Koreans have their own brand of it). I remember a story one of my friends told me about being on a bus in Latin America somewhere, and a woman who got on just handed her a baby to hold while the woman fished change out of her purse - and no one looked twice. And I remember children playing in the streets of Madrid becoming collective charges. And from anecdotes and writings about even other places, I think maybe this is the way most of the world works, to some degree.

There's good and bad to all these things, which you could argue forever, like most points of any culture. But everything else aside, it is extremely refreshing to feel so supported in doing your job - especially when it involves taking care of children.