When I first arrived in Busan, Mike, Julie and Dennis picked me up at Busan Station. It was a very kind gesture, and as Dave, Gavin and I currently prepare for a new teacher to arrive at the end of August, I think about that first night in Korea and the three foreigners who took me in and showed me the ropes.
Mike helped put my suitcase and backpack in the trunk of a taxi and left me in the capable hands of Julie and Dennis, who whisked me off to the Hamjigreen apartment where I was to live for the next two months. I'd been traveling nearly sixteen hours. My eyes were heavy with exhaustion and my mind was stunned by culture shock. I remember the cab ride as one long neon blur amid a flurry of advice flying from the lips of my new co-workers.
Most of what Julie and Dennis were telling me was delivered almost like one long inside joke between the Louisiana native and the tall Canadian woman. They would say something about Busan or Korea or ESS Jr. and then give each other a knowing look or a smirk and then follow with a series of assurances not to worry, that I would figure things out. Well, I did. They were right. There is a lot about Korea that you can't describe to a stranger, things that must be experienced.
Over the next few weeks, I was let in on many of the inside jokes, and introduced to others that I would not come to understand until much, much later. One of those jokes centered around ESS Jr.'s annual summer camp. Mike and Dennis discussed the camp one night over whisky and beer at their apartment.
Mike brought out a clear glass jar containing a wicked-looking two-inch long praying mantis the color of new grass. "Little Homey," as Mike lovingly called the tiny predator, was taken hostage during the three-day camp three weeks prior to my arrival. Mike and Dennis got a macabre sort of pleasure from watching Little Homey kill and messily devour cockroaches proffered from the disgusting floors of their unkempt apartment.
As we sat around the table drinking whisky and watching the foodchain in action, Mike and Dennis talked a little about the camp. Horrible, they said. Boring as hell, they said. Nothing to do but sit around, they said and gave each other those same knowing looks. "This is the only good thing about it," one of them said and indicated the mantis, who was furiously shoving a cockroach leg into its mandibles.
I don't know what happened to Little Homey after Mike and Dennis left in October. He probably found a nice home in the bushes by Dongsamjugong, a long way from his birthplace in Surak, three hours north of Busan. Last week I visited that sleepy, four-building farming community with Dave, Gavin, nearly the entire Korean staff and eighty of the middle school students. Mike and Dennis weren't joking: The ESS Best Jr. Summer Camp was one of strangest experiences I have ever had, here or anywhere, at any time in my life. It took three days of my life.
Everyone met at the Catholic church at the end of Gwangbokdong road and loaded our stuff into three long orange tour buses. I made sure not to drink too much fluids, as like most tour buses in Korea, these were missing their "heads" and I didn't want a repeat of the Gyeong-ju disaster (SoKoNotes 09/18/05). The kids piled into the buses with us, adorned in shorts, t-shirts, and stylish mp3 players hanging around their necks. The drivers put the rumbling engines into gear and we were off to Surak.
For the last eleven years, ESS Jr. has held its annual camp on a lot owned by Mr. Kim's father-in-law. The lot is surrounded by smalltime cucumber and gochu farms (gochus are a lot like jalapeno peppers) that line the narrow valley floor between two long mountain chains running North to South as far as the eye can see. Over dinner one night at camp, Mr. Kim told us his father-in-law picked the spot because it so closely resembled his former home in North Korea. Here's a quick landscape photo I took during a brief walk down the lone road snaking through the valley.
A restaurant and corner store were the only buildings found in a small village a few hundred meters up the road. Dave and I visited to the store twice, and I chatted up the "nongbu," or farmers, while Dave bought soda and snacks. They were kind, obviously good-natured people, and they all but begged to have their picture made. It was an honor.
The property itself was home to more than just Mr. Kim's father-in-law. As the bus turned and entered the gate, I saw a long, squat building that was once a school. It was badly run-down and old. Cracks and rusty pipes ran up its weathered, graying walls and the paint on the windows was filthy. Vines and bushes covered a molding marble statue of two children reading from a book.
According to my sources, Mr. Kim's father, who started ESS Best Jr., had plans of building an English boarding school in Surak where students could study all subjects - in English - all year long. Something went wrong, I don't know what, but all that remains of that dream is this decrepit building on this decrepit lot in a beautiful valley north of Busan.
An ESS Jr. banner, a microphone and some portable speakers were set up on the school's front steps. A long yellow and white banner set up at the opposite end of the field in front of the school welcomed students to the camp as they disembarked the buses. No sooner had they exited the bus than Mr. Kim made them form ranks behind their group flags and salute him as he took to the makeshift stage, switched on the microphone and welcomed them.
Over the course of the next three days, the students spent a lot of time making lines for Mr. Kim. It seemed like they couldn't do any activity before first lining up on the parade ground and listening to Mr. Kim talk about it first. Sometimes he made the children exercise, and sometimes they meditated. Sometimes Mr. Kim berated the students for something or the other and punished them. Here is Eun-bong, my most well-behaved third-year student, solumly going through the motions.
There was a lot of yelling and disciplining students who didn't line up properly. Sometimes it felt to me like 'making lines' was the focus of the camp, so often did the children form up.
The camp was divided up into roughly three areas: The parade ground and old school building, the children's sleeping quarters and the 'English Zone.' The children slept in four long barracks-style concrete buildings covered with thick green tarps. During the day, they were little more than greenhouses, and to step inside one was to enter a sauna. During the night, they were drafty and cold. The children slept in sleeping bags on mats laid out on the concrete floors of these buildings.
Here is a picture of a student from my 1S class, Jae-hyeon, getting some relief from the heat by standing in the doorway to his barracks.
Dave, Gavin, Mr. Yi, Byeong-soo, the photographer, Tae-hoon and I all slept in a spartan cottage sitting on the corner of the property. It had a small kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Silver dollar-sized wolf spiders hunted moths and cockroaches along the walls and there was no air-conditioning. Gavin, bless him, had the foresight to buy a bug net big enough to fit around a king-sized bed. Dave, Gavin and I slept in relative safety while our Korean roomies entrusted the blood in their veins to the buzzing purple bug-zapper screwed to the living room wall.
The men's living quarters was adjacent to the English Zone: Basically a large concrete slab covered by a wrist-thick metal skeleton where once Mr. Kim's father dreamed of building a mess hall to feed all the students in his doomed boarding school. White PCB pipes for sewage and water jutted out of the slab, awaiting sinks and faucets that would never materialize.
The high school students strung up a huge black net from the metal frame over the English Zone to provide shade for the students, who would spend a great deal of time there over the next three days. The shade provided a good place to kill time while we waited for the students to break ranks and engage in the various activities Mr. Kim planned for them. Here's Dave practicing for his upcoming vacation in Thailand.
There was a lot of time to kill, what with the kids always forming up and meditating all the time. Even when they weren't meditating or listening to Mr. Kim, there was still lots of time to kill as the Korean staff prepared the next activity. There were a lot of breaks, and you know what they say about idle hands. The boys quickly discovered how to pluck gigantic neon dragonflies off of low branches and telephone wires by their wings. They would then chase the girls around camp, the struggling insects held out in front of them.
We were all assigned to four groups. Mrs. Ha and I lead group one. One of the first activities of the day involved preparing our group for the debate happening the next day. The topic: Is the Internet a good thing? Our team was assigned to argue that the internet was not good, but a bad thing. Each child was required to add a unique point, in English, during the debate. Twenty children. Twenty reasons the internet is a bad thing.
Group one met in the sweltering barracks to discuss the topic. The students furiously fanned themselves against the heat as the seniors stood up and took charge. By 'took charge' I mean they stood there and waited patiently for someone to speak. The students were required to debate in English, but no one could speak English well enough to make the complex arguments needed to discuss an already difficult topic. An uncomfortable silence hung like the heat in the number one barracks as the students tried to form sentences in their heads.
Finally, Ms. Ha took charge and let the students make their arguments in Hangulmal. She dutifully wrote them down and then she and I carefully translated each argument into English while the children worked on another assignment. The students only gave us ten good sentences. We had to think of ten more on our own. After writing them all down, we handed them out and the students began memorizing them like lines from a script. Gavin, Dave and I helped them.
After the debate prep, the students met under the black tarp to cook Curry Rice for dinner. Dave was handed the recipe and told to read it step-by-step for the students. I was to be the official taster and Gavin was to help the students cook. They did this two times, once Thursday and once Friday. Usually one to four students took charge while the rest of the group hung back, spoons in hand, waiting to eat.
In group three, one girl, Ji-na, was the sole cook, and the workload was too much for her. Her curry was burning. The other students, who didn't care much for Ji-na because she was pudgy, confidant and self-reliant, stood around and insulted her, spoons in their hands.
"Burning, teacher. Smell!" They told me as I approached. This disgusted me and I shot back, "Oh, yeah? Have you done anything to help her?" I don't think they understand what I said, but they understood my tone and the direction my accusatory finger was pointing: Towards the ground where Ji-na was working furiously to keep the burning curry under control. Two or three put down their forks and tried to help Ji-na, who was obviously and audibly frustrated with them and shooed them off.
After dinner we all met at the parade ground to learn a 'folk dance' set to the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA." I guess the Beach Boys is what passes for traditional American music, and of course, the dancing was little more than country-style line dancing with twirls, sidesteps and fingers pointing, disco-style, into the air. More lines, I thought, this time dancing. Dancing lines of children.
After dinner, we reconverted on the parade ground to gaze at the stars. The children brought their sleeping mats, laid them out on the grass, and looked up at the stars as I read from a prepared script on constellations. I read with a deep, serious voice like I was Leonard Nimoy and this was NOVA. The script itself was absurd, totally asinine. Gavin and Dave played mysterious tracks from their iPods while I read, and I thought I could hear them snickering from behind me. It was all I could do to keep a strait face.
Here is an excerpt from the script:
"The regions around the celestial south pole got some of their names when the astronomer Johan Bayer made his notes about the south regions of the sky. He followed the tradition of the names of the ancient, mainly connected to the sea and its creatures. Later on the French astronomer La Caille added the last 13 to fill the star-poor regions between the existing groups. He finally broke with the traditional name giving and used scientific equipment or instruments (there is only one exception, which is Mensa, the Table Mountain)"
My God, I thought as I read. Nobody was going to understand this garbage. These kids could barely name their favorite foods in English, and here I am reading about La Caille and Mensa, "The Table Mountain." Someone had spent all of ten minutes cutting and pasting random passages from the internet to make this script.
Clouds began to drift in as I started the second reading of the bogus constellations lesson. They reflected the light from a city on the other side of the eastern mountain and obscured the night sky. No stars could be seen, and still I read on. Once I finished, it was meditation time, so Gavin, Dave and I walked back to the cottage and had a good laugh.
The next day we held a mini-olympics, part of which involved a jump rope.
The four groups also took part in a scavenger hunt arranged by Gavin and I. It was fun making the clues into simple plays on English words, and even more fun watching the kids figure them out and race around the lot searching for the treasure: Plastic dollar bills to be redeemed for pencils and notebooks on Saturday. Gavin then read the questions for a massive four-group true-or-false quiz, which the students thoroughly enjoyed.
After the quiz, The Native teachers played a game with the kids in which the kids had to describe things to us in English and we had to guess what it was. The high school girls held the cards with the words written on them for the kids to describe. The kids really enjoyed the game, and some really impressed me, such as Da-mi, trying to describe something to Dave.
Later on, we held the debate on whether or not the internet was a good thing. All four groups converged on the English Zone and sat down. Two third-year students, Han-eol and Ah-jin, turned on their mics, introduced the topic like nobody had heard it before and waited for a lively debate to ensue. Silence. Nervous, awful silence. Mrs. Nam went from group to group, trying to encourage the students to speak.
A few students stood and read their lines from the tiny scraps of paper on which they were written, but it was obviously not sufficient for Mr. Kim, who stormed off. Later, the students formed ranks on the parade ground and received a lecture for the snafu that wasn't their fault at all.
It wasn't their fault because that wasn't the format Mrs. Nam, Dave and I originally discussed a month earlier while planning the debate. In the beginning of July we mapped out a classic two-on-two debate style and four topics for discussion. Only the oldest children would participate, and they would get to argue the topic and position of their choice so as to optimize their ability and be well-prepared for the debate. For the entire month of July, Dave and I worked with our third-year students on their various topics, creating arguments, teaching debating phrases and even staging a practice debate.
Two weeks before the camp, Mrs. Nam radically changed the format. The topic and debaters were going to be randomly chosen by Mr. Kim, she said, and the first and second-year students were going to take part, too. Dave and I were to start teaching the children "how to debate" immediately. Dave and I exchanged confused, stunned looks. Had we been living in reality this past month? What about the original plan, the one she herself had helped make?
We put these questions and others to Mrs. Nam. Dave even handed her the worksheet we all had drawn up, but she ignored everything and simply repeated the edict all over again, verbatim. Her tone was a hostile deadpan meant to cut off debate. Still, Dave pleaded with her for a rationale behind the sudden change in plans. Mrs. Nam narrowed her eyes, intentionally sighed and repeated the command a third time, this time slower, like we were morons. Dave and I shrugged. OK, whatever.
The debate was a sham, a clusterfuck. All that work went down the drain.
As we were 'debating,' the high school and college students who had volunteered to help out dug a fire pit in the middle of the parade ground and stacked it high with scrap wood, old clothes, cardboard boxes and other junk from around the property. They soaked the whole thing in gasoline and lighter fluid and strung a long metal wire from the base of the firepit to the roof of the school. I theorized that they were going to light the bonfire with a bottle rocket attached to the metal wire and launched from the building.
Other high school students cut rags into long strips, soaked them in gasoline, and wrapped them around three steel re-bar letters in the shape of ESS. They planted this at the edge of the field.
That night the students converged around the fire pit. Mr. Kim lit the field with the high beams from his Chairman sedan. The effect was eerie.
While the students set up their mats around the firepit, the high schoolers threw more gasoline on the junk collected in the fire pit. Sook-hyeon then read a speech, and it ended on a dramatic note that filled the air with anticipation as the students on the roof of the building lit a candle and sent it sliding down the wire towards the firepit. I guess they forgot about gravity though, because the can was too heavy for the wire, and it fell to the ground with an anticlimatic clunk. There was stifled laughter from somewhere in the darkness behind me and I could hear the high schoolers in front of me scrambling to find the fallen lantern and re-light it.
There was a long, awkward pause and then suddenly the bonfire roared to life with a fiery WHOOSH! A huge fireball climbed into the night sky and I saw the silhouettes of the high schoolers running for cover as the massive pile of gasoline-soaked junk exploded into flames. The students shrieked with fear and delight and clapped as roman candles and fireworks began to go off all around them. The orange-yellow light cast their faces in a warm glow and the air filled with the scent of burning plastic.
Mr. Kim then took a gasoline-soaked rag on a stick, lit it with the bonfire, and with the help of two students, set fire to the ESS sign.
Gavin later noted that nobody told us that there were roman candles hidden in the grass at our feet. We couldn't see well as we picked spots outside of the ring of students to stand and witness the event. If one of us or the children had been standing next to or over the fireworks, we could have been badly injured.
In fact, the entire event was marked by wild recklessness and inattention to safety. Where were the fire extinguishers? How far away was the nearest hospital? Did anyone know how a pile of gasoline-soaked wood and clothes would act once lit? What was worse, the high schoolers randomly ran up to the raging bonfire with a plastic gas can and tossed gasoline on the flames. The can was mostly empty, and probably mostly filled with fumes. The wrong spark and it could have gone off like a bomb. Another student repeatedly ran up to the fire with a pressurized aerosol can, aimed it at the base of the fire and turned it into a mini flame-thrower. Again, another stupid, potentially explosive act.
I was disgusted. This was behavior typical of the videos you see on websites like College Humor, the ones where reckless rednecks end up getting badly hurt. What was Mr. Kim thinking?
The next day went a little better. We hosted a situational English lesson in the main building. I played the part of a customs agent in LaGuardia airport, checking people's passports. I hammed it up and put on my best New York accent. I acted rude, doing my best to imitate a bored beaurocrat who cares more about his pension than the people trying to get into his country. I made sure to turn away anyone who couldn't properly pronounce the dialogue they had memorized.
"Hey buddy, you got problems, I got problems, we all got problems. Go over there and fill out form 576-B and come see me when you can speak some English...NEXT!"
The weather was very hot. Mr. Kim would take the kids out jogging in the early morning, riding in his car ahead of the group as they pounded the pavement behind him. They would line up afterwards, soaked in sweat. The high school and college students were smart. Each wore a big-brimmed hat called a milljip moja. Here are a few examples. This first picture is of my former student, Seung-hwa.
This is Tae-hoon, the newest Korean teacher. He is the only male Korean teacher, and he struggled all weekend to balance the demands of being Korean with an obvious desire to be "one of the guys." A music composer who spent three years in New York, Tae-hoon returned to Busan to support his family.
Well, that's pretty much it. After the Situational English lesson and a departing speech from yours truly, we piled back onto the big orange buses and returned to Busan. The camp wasn't quite as bad as Mike and Dennis made it out to be, but it was certainly a far cry from the camps of my youth.
When I was a boy, camp was not about lines and discipline, it was about breaking out of the rut of daily life and having fun. When I was an adolescent, I went every summer for one week to Camp Mikel in North Georgia with my best friend Wes. We stayed for a week and did things like rock-climbing, obstacle course races, arts and crafts classes, five-ball soccer games, water fights, four-square, overnight backpacking trips, nature walks and dances. Everything was very well-planned.
One of my main problems with the ESS Jr. camp was the underutilized resources. There were soccer balls in the house and a field to play in. There were nature trails leading into the mountains. There were farms all around begging to be explored and explained to these city-dwelling children. Insects filled the air and a beautiful stream followed the country lane through the valley. They could have been learning traditional Korean crafts like pottery or sewing. They could have been learning about their heritage and history. And they could have done all of this in English.
Instead, the students were forming lines, listening to speeches, meditating and performing tasks they did every week in classrooms back in Busan. The only free time the children had besides the time spent waiting for the next activity or formation was the half-hour or so they spent splashing around in that creek. I really felt sorry for them.
However, I am alone in that regard. The children themselves never felt anything like selfpity or regret. One of the magical aspects of children is their amazing resiliency to boredom. Time and time again the children impress me with their ability to turn lemons into lemonade, to find the silver lining in every cloud, to have fun in non-fun situations. Heck, the happiest I saw them during the camp was after a meal, doing the dishes.
The kids who didn't help cook cleaned up. They gathered around the twin banks of water faucets near the men's cottage and scrubbed dishes together. All of the Korean teachers and Mr. Kim were in their rooms by that time, so it was de facto free time. The students worked together as teams to get the job done fast. Water splashed, children laughed, it was total chaos, but it was innocent and friendly and no one was going to get yelled at for it. I've never seen them so happy.
Many of the students used the three days away from home to reach out to one another and make new friends, or strengthen existing bonds. I even saw a few of the older children flirting with one another. I think they all really enjoyed the feeling of being on their own, away from their parents.
The next week I asked them what they thought of the camp, and most of them gave me a resounding thumbs-up. They had a blast. They didn't see the negative things that caught my eye. They never guessed that their lives were in danger the night of the bonfire, or that there were a million more constructive things that they could have been doing than listening to Dave drone on about cutting onions and carrots. They saw what they wanted to see, and what they saw was mostly positive. They had a good attitude. I was proud of them.
As for Gavin, Dave and I, we were bored out of our minds most of the time. There simply wasn't enough for us to do. We spent most of the time playing 20-questions and reading. We all did a fair share of just standing around, too. Luckily, the food made by Mr. Kim's wife and her friends was pretty good, and Gavin bought PB&J and trailmix for snacks. I brought the coffee pot, which made the early mornings easier to stomach. Dave brought his masterful wit, which made the whole thing a lot funnier.
I only have two and a half weeks left. One more week of teaching. I can't believe I'm at the end. Peace. --Notes
