I have not fallen of the face of the earth...

Our schedules have been very busy, and internet access has been spotty at best, so I will be playing catch up a bit tonight and tomorrow since we have the glorious start time of noon tomorrow. :D

I'm about a week behind here, but only a few days behind on paper, so there will be a lot quickly. Pictures someday soon maybe too!

So we'll go back to last Tuesday and Wednesday...We begun Tuesday with a visit to a Christian Girl's High School. The school begun as a missionary school, and is an all girls school because at the time there were no schools for girls. We gave our presentation on life on Long Island for the first time to a group of students who are learning English, they had a very good grasp of the language-good enough to even get some of my jokes! The students were preparing for their midterm exams, so they may have been a little distracted through the presentation (there were a few sheets of notes being shuffled on the desks in front of them) but I'm still counting it as a success. I spent a lot of time and effort to get the presentation together, so I'm glad our first run through went well.

For Lunch we attended our first Rotary Club meeting, and were introduced to the Rotary Song in Korean. The meeting was obviously very structured, we were introduced early on, and then got a chance to introduce our selves a little more later on. There were awards given, we sang 'Happy Birthday" (in Korean!) to a club member who had a birthday, we ate the spiciest soup yet on this trip, and exactly 45 minutes later, the room emptied out.
After lunch, we went to another orphanage. We didn't spend as much time with the children this time, since they were mainly in school, but we did sit with the director and learn a lot about the history of the orphanage. It was founded in 1957 by the current director's father. There are currently 108 children living there, in group homes of 10-12 children. They changed the name from 'orphanage" to institute because the children disliked saying that they were orphans, due to the stigma. Since many of the children do have parents, but were placed in this institute by the government after their parent's divorce because the parents were unable or unwilling to care for them, the term 'orphanage' is incorrect anyway. The children come as young as a year or two old, and can stay until they are finished with University, which the institute pays for with donations. There are 26 employees, and a rotating stream of volunteers. In the summer months, high school students are required to do 8-20 hours of community service, and so many of them want to do so at the institute, a volunteer is required to organize the volunteers. Somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 children have been through this institute since it's founding. There are 284 orphanages in Korea, housing 18,000 children. 10 of these are in Gwanju, housing about 750 orphans. This is a number that will not likely go down with the divorce rate so high (above 50%, and even higher than the US) and a very sad situation for the children who live like this.

Wednesday was a quieter day-another festival, bamboo this time, then some shopping downtown. We moved to a new club, this one has a very different feel then many of the others, particularly the last. This group still has younger children, and thus is more family orientated then the last few. Dinner was at a more casual restaurant, with much less drinking than the last club, and then the 4 team members moved into one apartment (unfortunately taking the bedrooms of the family's two university student children, who were good sports about it) while our team leader moved into another apartment with younger children. I was able to connect my own computer to the internet (!!!!!!!!!YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and do a bunch of work in the evenings. This meant that I was lacking a bit in the sleep department for a few days, but un-inturrupted internet access is worth it.