Wednesday, January 28, 2009

English Camps

Since I haven't worked a real job since July, all throughout the fall I'd been looking for winter English camp jobs to supplement my lack of income. Luckily, Fulbright (whose English camp I taught at this summer) started a new winter English camp that I hopped onto, and so January third I caught a train 3 hours south to just about as far south as you can go in mainland Korea, to a town called Mokpo. The camp was put together by the board of education for an area called Shinan, that is a group of thousands of islands off the mainland of Korea, and people still live on many of these islands, go to school, farm, and do what people do on the mainland minus the convenience of a nearby city and plus the benefit of doing it on a beautiful, green, craggy island. Plus, the area is famed for having the second largest sea salt field in the world (next to brittany -- where celtic sea salt comes from). All of the kids took boats or crossed huge steel bridges to get from their homes to the mainland. Sixty 6th graders piled in with us at a local YMCA, and teaching these kids was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in Korea.

Compared to the Fulbright camp I taught over the summer, all of the instructors and counselors got much closer and many of us went on to another camp in Pohang that followed immediately after the Mokpo camp. Over the course of these camps I learned many swear words and extremely rude words in Korean through the korean counselors and finally chose a Korean name -- 김더덕 (Kim Deo Deok). Deo Deok is a relative of ginseng, and in the hierarchy of the ginseng family, it ranks the lowest. Which, I feel, fits my personality well, plus when its broiled its one of my favorite Korean foods.

Also of note, Korea leased half the arable land in Madagascar for growing corn and palm oil(http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1861145,00.html) for processed foods and ethanol.