Well my plan was to post this, like, last Saturday, right after the trip.
But still, experiencing it myself, it wasn't pleasant at all. After all, I was the one who cut his fingernails while suffering from his body odor and getting his spit all over my hand. Is saying "I don't think your toenails need more cutting, it's too short" that bad of a thing to say? So bad that the reply should be "F***?" Couldn't he have at least smiled at me once? What was so bad about cutting the nails that he had to frown the whole time? I do realize that I am the one who came here for volunteer work and he's the one living here, but that still doesn't give him the right to swear at me, does it? Yes, I know it's volunteer, I'm not here to get awarded or be thanked for what I do, but I'm not here to hear random swear words thrown at me either.
I couldn't really relate to this at first, but looking at the people living there, I could feel it. Most of them seemed to be trapped in their own worlds. When I tried to talk to them, they stayed silent (even those who didn't have speech impediments), and many seemed to be poor at expressing their emotions. That probably was because they had hard times before they came to Kkottongnae. Some of them were abandoned in the streets, some of them lost their families, and some of them didn't have a home to go back. Here, they became a part of the Kkottongnae family, and seemed to have partly recovered from the scars, but they still looked like they missed their real family, after what their family had done to them. They still missed them.
Well, I don't mean we should leave them out in the streets; they're gonna die if we do.
But then I went home afterwards and realized that I had the finals in like two weeks.. And yeah.
(Well now the finals are less than a week away and I'm nowhere near finishing.. Oh well.)
Anyways. That's why I'm so late with this.
And well.. Right after the trip I had this flood of emotions but now it all went away.. Now it's not gonna fully reflect what I learned there. I really shouldn't have procrastinated.
Oh well.
| The entrance of Kkottongnae |
There's this place called Kkottongnae, in Eumseong, Chungcheongbuk-do, which is a facility for the disabled and the homeless, especially those who have been abandoned by their families. It was first started by a man named Guidong Choi and a priest named Woongjin Oh: Mr. Choi, a mendicant himself, had been feeding other homeless men with his own food for decades, and Father Oh, finding out about this, built a house for beggars, which eventually became the start of what is now Kkottongnae.
So from June 19th to 21st, we (10th graders at KMLA) all went there for volunteer work. It was about two and a half hours' drive from our school, and by the time we got there, with the early lunch at the service area and a ton of sleep in the bus, we were all full of energy. xD
Frankly speaking, before I went, I thought it would be nothing more than a typical school volunteer work, which, in other words, means that we aren't actually gonna learn anything that we're supposed to be learning through those experiences. Well you know what it's like. Supposedly, we're to learn how hard the lives of those people are and have love and hope and all that embedded in our hearts and try our best taking care of the people there. But usually, we care more about hanging out with friends in the evening, not going to school and the morning exercises for three days, all that stuff. As for the volunteer part, well... Probably just several hours of standing there and being bored.
And even if I look at this volunteering thing in the right way, I still didn't think I'd learn much because I thought I had learned enough from my experiences in Uganda. I had seen how the Ugandans suffer from poverty, from diseases, from disabilities. And I thought I had tried my best to help them. And doing this thing in Kkottongnae wasn't gonna get me any further. It couldn't be more valuable than what I had done in Uganda.
Well, maybe it was just my conceit. Of being too proud about what I did in Uganda.
Because I was completely wrong.
Looking back on my experience in Kkottongnae now, I really learned, and felt, a lot of things.
1) Volunteer Work
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| House of Hope |
For the volunteer work, I went to the House of Hope, which was for the severely disabled people aged between 20 and 65. I was assigned to room 104 to help the people, but since the room members seemed to be having fun among themselves and didn't require a lot of help, I got to do some other things.
The first thing I did was cleaning the bathroom and emptying the trash. Well, cleaning the bathroom wasn't that hard. But emptying the trash.. Oh god. We had to sort the trash by their type--you know, paper, vinyl, plastic, that kind of stuff. And there were all kinds of trash in there. Newspapers, tissues, wrappers, medicines, vomit. With everything mingling with each other and gradually rotting, it smelled.. Bad. Disgusting. I really wanted to throw up (somehow I managed not to).. And I realized that compared to this, what I called "volunteer work" in Uganda was nothing. Well that wasn't so hard as this.. I'd rather work in the sun all day than sort the trash.. :-/
Then I cleaned the room I was assigned to, and when I came outside, one of the residents called me, and told me to cut people's nails with his nail clippers. Wow. Finally. After all, I had a job to do that was rather easy and not so disgusting.
Wrong.
For the first person, it wasn't that hard cutting his nails. The problem was that he was far from clean. There was black dirt under every single one of his nails, and honestly, the dirt seemed to have become one with his body. He smelled really bad (I had to hold my breath from time to time) and he was drooling. Well, the drooling part might have been caused by his disability, but still, it wasn't so pleasant. When I was working on his right hand, I saw him drooling on his left hand. Then came the time to cut his left fingernails. Err, well, I knew that his saliva was gonna be all over my hand if I held his left hand, but well, I had to do it anyway and I didn't wanna upset him by frowning and hesitating. After all, I was the one who was volunteering here. I should have expected this kind of thing. So I just held his hand, with his saliva dripping from it, and cut his fingernails.
After I was done with his left hand, I thought I was done. But then he held out his feet. Umm, okay. So I started cutting his toenails, and realized there was nothing to cut. It seemed that someone cut it for him recently; it was pretty short and neat. I didn't think it needed any more cutting, so I told him so. And he replied, "F***."
...What?
Then it dawned on me that maybe he thought I was refusing because I didn't want to cut his nails anymore. But I had no intention of such kind. I'd love to help him by cutting his nails, but seriously, how am I going to do it if there is nothing to cut? So I tried to explain once more, that his toenails were short and neat, and that I didn't think I needed to cut them anymore.
"F***."
Okay, okay, whatever. I'll cut them. I cut out what was left of his white part of the nails, and tried to make it neater. And when I was done with both of his feet, he left. Glaring at me till the end, saying nothing. Ehh, shouldn't have expected in the first place.
Well, one of the teachers had warned us that some of the residents there might completely ignore us or even say bad words because they aren't good at expressing thanks. Which is understandable, considering that many of them had spent years, even decades, on the street with nobody paying much attention to them. Before they came here, the best thing they had experienced from others would probably have been some random guy giving them a 1000-won bill or something. Most people would've just passed by, probably looking at them with contempt and disgust. Sadly, that's how it is. So I see why they wouldn't be good at saying "thank you."
But still, experiencing it myself, it wasn't pleasant at all. After all, I was the one who cut his fingernails while suffering from his body odor and getting his spit all over my hand. Is saying "I don't think your toenails need more cutting, it's too short" that bad of a thing to say? So bad that the reply should be "F***?" Couldn't he have at least smiled at me once? What was so bad about cutting the nails that he had to frown the whole time? I do realize that I am the one who came here for volunteer work and he's the one living here, but that still doesn't give him the right to swear at me, does it? Yes, I know it's volunteer, I'm not here to get awarded or be thanked for what I do, but I'm not here to hear random swear words thrown at me either.
The second person whose nails I cut was better. He didn't smell bad and he seemed to be smiling all the way. But now it was time for me to push myself to the limit in a physical sense. His disability prevented him from moving his body the way he wanted, so he couldn't hold his hands still, nor could he stretch out the fingers he wanted. So I had to fold and bend my body in all kinds of ways to get into a right position where I could cut his nails. Most of the time, that meant twisting my body in a way that I never thought I could. But in the end, I managed to cut all his nails.
And this time, although I was sweating and my waist hurt a bit, I was happy. A bit from the sense of accomplishment, of being proud of finishing the hard job, but mostly from how he was beaming at me. He couldn't talk, but I could see in his eyes that he was happy and everything.
Then it became lunchtime and my last job was to feed one of the disabled people. There were rice, soup, and three different kinds of side dish, so (of course) I thought I'd be giving them different kinds of food one by one. But to my surprise, the helper there just mixed everything and told me to give them that. Now it didn't look like food anymore; rather, it looked like food waste. You know, how we mix up all the leftovers after meals to make it easier to clean up. Oh well. If that's how these people eat.. Then okay. I did what I was told to do (well the person I was feeding actually ate it as if it was really delicious..) and that was it. I was done with the volunteer work.
And over the course of the volunteering, I had a couple of thoughts in my head..
First, it really was gonna be hard being left alone and abandoned by your family.
I couldn't really relate to this at first, but looking at the people living there, I could feel it. Most of them seemed to be trapped in their own worlds. When I tried to talk to them, they stayed silent (even those who didn't have speech impediments), and many seemed to be poor at expressing their emotions. That probably was because they had hard times before they came to Kkottongnae. Some of them were abandoned in the streets, some of them lost their families, and some of them didn't have a home to go back. Here, they became a part of the Kkottongnae family, and seemed to have partly recovered from the scars, but they still looked like they missed their real family, after what their family had done to them. They still missed them.
And thinking about it, just the thought of abandoning one's mom or dad just because they became obstacles to life and taking care of them costs a lot of money.. Is that even possible? Old and weak and disabled, abandoned in the streets they could pass away anytime and nobody's going to know, nobody's going to care. And these people are letting that happen to their family members because of money, because it's tiresome to take care of them. Who knows what would've happened if someone didn't find them and bring them to Kkottongnae?
It's their family. Their parents. Someone who raised them and loved them for more than half a century. It's their responsibility to return the favor, to take care of their parents so that they can live the rest of their lives happily in the love of their children. Just the fact that their parents are old and weak doesn't mean that they aren't their parents anymore. I really don't understand.
Second, I wasn't really sure if it was the best way to let all these people live in Kkottongnae.
Well, I don't mean we should leave them out in the streets; they're gonna die if we do.
But working at Kkottongnae for a short time, I didn't get any feeling of happiness from the people there. They didn't have any freedom. Look at the lunch they had. It was a concoction of a weird combination of food. As I remember, it was a mixture of rice, kimchi soup, jeon (a vegetable pancake), and japchae (sauteed vegetables with potato noodles). How's that gonna taste? And the helpers there weren't so kind either. They kept shoving the disabled people here and there and yelled at them for not moving quickly enough. Look, they have disabilities. Wouldn't it be right to let them take their time?
It's not like I have a better alternative. And facilities like Kkottongnae probably is the best way, for now, to take care of the disabled. And since I've just been there for only like five hours, of course the helpers and the employees there will know a lot more than me. But still, from what I saw during those five hours, it didn't seem like a very friendly, happy environment for the people.
Okay.. I didn't expect it to be so long.. And I still have plenty more to write about.
But well, there's the finals coming up soon, so I've gotta study too..
So I'll just wrap it up here for now (it took me two days to write this bit), and come back later with part two.
...And I think it's already more than long enough for a blog post anyway.
