Week Three Highlights at Supho
Published: July 21, 2020
Dear SupHo families,
There is less than a week remaining in the credit program! Here are a few highlights from the past few days:
- Our credit villagers continue to exchange emails with their pen-pals. Some are writing to current staff; some are writing to staff that worked previous summers. We had so many volunteers for this activity that it was easy to match our 24 villagers with different, eager partners.
- The Webtoons and Translation activity staff shared some of the villagers’ art, and we were blown away! Anyone who says that the arts are dying have not met the villagers of Sup sogŭi Hosu. Our coding club also got creative and put together ‘alternative’ sound effects that produced an eerily moving soundtrack. Here is a small sample of the works we shared:
- Highlights from the one-week program: our villagers wrote letters to friends and relatives; took pictures from their cooking activity; and shared what is on their minds. They had fun running away from zombies, making traditional-style folding panels, and learning names of kicks in Taekwondo (while kicking, of course!).
- Our villagers have by now learned two famous children’s songs, both by writers from Korea’s colonial period, set to music by Korea’s most famous composer for children Yun Kŭkyŏng. One is about stars, and one about icicles. Try to get them to sing for you! If they have forgotten the tune, links to YouTube recordings can be found in their language Google Classroom.
- Morning Greetings keep pouring in from staff, current and former. You can check out the growing list of greeters on our YouTube Channel, here.
- Our third weekend program for credit villagers focused on Korea’s protest culture. The program leader (and translation activity counselor), Hyori, started by asking the villagers about their experiences protesting. She asked, what were you protesting? What forms did your protest take? What drove you to protest? If you didn’t, what kept you away? Then the villagers divided into groups, and each was responsible for researching and presenting on one of four events: the student protests of the 1960s, the democratization movements of the 1980s, the anti-American demonstrations of the early 2000s, and the recent candlelight demonstrations that helped bring about the impeachment of the South Korean president. In their groups, villagers encountered a protest song, a photograph, a work of art, and a poem. They then shared their thoughts about what they learned.
- In the last hour of the activity, our villagers had a chance to interview our former US ambassador to South Korea, Kathleen Stephens. Having witnessed streets full of young people demanding change first-hand, Ambassador Stephens shared her memories of the passion and desire of Koreans to make their voices heard. Some of the questions our villagers asked her included:
- How did you get interested in Korea?
- How did your time in the Peace Corps change your views on Korea as a political officer and then ambassador?
- How were protests managed differently in the time you spent in Korea?
- You’ve seen protest culture evolve in Korea; where do you think it is going?
- What is the day-to-day job of an ambassador?
Ambassador Stephens retired from the State Department after 37 years of service and is now the CEO of the Korean Economic Institute. She is a great friend of the village and has visited us in person several years in a row. She is a firm believer in the importance of fostering interest in languages and in pursuing deep, meaningful knowledge about the world. We hope to see her in person again in our new village, which is under construction, in 2021.
We are already two days into week four. At the end of this week, we look forward to celebrating the villagers’ growth over the last week and month, to sharing their projects and talents, and to having fun with our final one-week program.
Stay safe, everyone.
Dahee
