27 Days and Counting

Picture note: A common sight to see friends holding hands or in this situation mostly likely mother and daughter.

We are in the home stretch, although still pending some important paperwork, our estimated departure date is June 27th. Our flights home will hopefully include a three-day layover in Hawaii.

We will have lived in Korea just a little over one year. And as fate would have it, of course, during these last few months we have discovered many things that would have been quite helpful twelve months ago. Like, I just discovered the pediatrician in our home town who speaks English and is very friendly. We’ve been schlepping 40 minutes to Daegu city every time the kids came down with something. These wonderful children’s academies that line the streets with art, music and taekwondo lessons are fairly easy to enroll in, are very cheap and provide great after school extra curricular activities for Benjamin. I even have myself taking piano lessons four days a week for the last month that we will be here so I am prepared to greet my piano back home.

It’s really amazing just how much time it takes just to get situated in a foreign place and get a bearing of your surroundings if you are not living in an area populated by many expats, and – especially when young children are involved.

One thing Steve and I have had several conversations about is the way we will act toward foreigners or immigrants in the U.S. in the future. Not to feel indifferent. We will always try to lend a helping hand when we can or provide assistance. We have come to know first hand the struggles of living in a strange land where you can’t speak the language and aren’t familiar with the customs. We have been extremely fortunate to have English speaking Korean neighbors who have made many situations easier for us, communicating with Sadie’s school or providing directions when we were lost.

I think our family should make it a mitzvah project and practice gemilut hasadim (in Hebrew “an act of loving-kindness”) to help out local immigrants in some way when we return so we can give back the same kindness we received so often., make a better effort to befriend the parents of our kids’ classmates who are from different countries and are too shy to introduce themselves. I want to spare someone the tears of frustration that I encountered on occasions, the feeling of being lost, and an outsider. It may be as simple as saying, “hey, I can tell you where you can get a great discount on shoes, or we know a really nice park you can take your kids to.” The list is endless.

So it may have taken just as long as our stay to figure some things out, but we gained some additional skills in being resourceful and creative along the way that we can apply in other areas of our lives. We may have never completely gotten ourselves into a groove, but powerful lessons were learned and some big accomplishments were made.