Sunday, June 17, 2013
I've been waking up early, and today was no exception. I spent the early morning reading some more of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. In preparation for feeding the homeless, I also looked up some articles about the homelessness situation in South Korea.
The total number of homeless individuals in South Korea ranges from estimates of 1,500 to 4,000 -- even the higher figure might be an underestimate. About 15% of Koreans fall below the poverty line, which, I found to be interesting, is defined as half the median household income.
There are some private efforts to fight homelessness, including at least one effort at microfinance/co-op banking. Christian churches and organizations are also involved. There is a welfare program, though I don't have a clear sense of whether or not the payments are sufficient to guarantee necessities, or if the payments have been subject to pressure from morality politics, as in the US.
In the recent past, Seoul station had been a gathering place of sorts for a sizable portion of the homeless population. That has changed somewhat: the authorities, in response to complaints from travelers, have started clearing out the station on a regular basis.
This is confirmed in anecdotes from my friend and her group. They mention that there's been a reduction in the number of homeless men in and around the station. Some plaintively, perhaps naively, hope that the absent transients somehow achieved better circumstances.
Each member/couple in the group (7 total, excluding me) had brought something to contribute. Whenever we met someone who appeared to be homeless, we provided a sandwich, a banana, a juice carton, and two choco pies. The group had evidently done this for a while. There was a moment of unexpected humor when a guy wanted a banana -- "Wow! He never wants bananas!"
The group consisted of four young women, idealistic perhaps, but not naive. There were a couple instances when they preferred to hang back, and let the men deliver the foodstuffs. An older man, a professor at the new SUNY campus, mentioned that the group avoided a certain area where the men tended to be drunk and more aggressive.
In general, all the men were very grateful and polite. One even said "Thank you!" multiple times in English. Another man was memorable for having makeup and appearing to be at least somewhat in drag.
I haven't fed the homeless, or done any poverty-related volunteer work, since college, 8 years ago. The whole experience reminded of one of the things that made me uncomfortable when I was working on a homeless lunch program during college. Is this something that helps? Is this something that I use, subconsciously, to avoid doing something more substantive, more structural? Of course, doing nothing because token efforts are determined to be token is not acceptable, either.
In the end, I decided that the intentions of the people I was with were noble. They weren't naive, or overly idealistic. Although they were all affiliated with one of two churches, and were all expats, they didn't project their sense of morality on broader Korean society (e.g., "Why don't they do something about this?"), and they weren't proselytizing, except, of course, by example.
If a good person does a good thing, however small, the whole of humanity benefits.
After a lunch with this group, I returned home, and watched Man of Steel. It was a glimpse, of course, of another Korea -- comfortably middle class (movies are, perhaps, relatively expensive and more of a treat than in the States), young, attractive, and hopeful. The movie was subtitled in Korean. I confess that I was impressed that the audience got the jokes sprinkled through the movie quickly, and laughed heartily. I'm not sure why I expected otherwise.
I spent the final hours of the evening wrestling a bit with how to use boolean logic to impose my will on a spreadsheet of vocabulary words. As with the beginning of the day, I decided upon an incomplete, but sufficient, approach, and slept soundly.
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