The Korean winter can get unpleasantly cold and long, and the coal briquettes were too heavy for them to carry (3.5kg), so we used teamwork where a member at the distributing center would hand out the briquettes to volunteers who would carry them to each house. We provided each house with two hundred briquesttes. Each day, a household usually burns one to three.
As I ponder on my life abroad, I feel like I’m an adult and a child at the same time, because there are things that I accomplish by myself, and yet at times, I need my hand to be held, at least metaphorically. For instance, just to use the washer, I have to research all the settings because they’re all in Korean. When I go to the market, it takes more time because I have to translate words one by one. I still can’t go to the bank or post office by myself because I can’t understand a word the workers say, let alone express what I want to be done. Because the language barrier cripples me from doing what I can normally do by myself, I’ve come to be grateful to all the people that have offered help even when I didn’t expect any, and I’ve come to cherish every little connection I have made. Through the volunteer work I did, I got to see a new side of life in South Korea and its people. I was very happy to have paid back the kindness of strangers by doing something good in their community.
