TEAM

Our TEAM leader - Eunshin (guy in the plaid shirt) and Josue (from Honduras)


This is Dongbok Ki. He was with OM in Africa for one year. Lynne, he has a friend with OM who is in Kosovo. If you meet a Korean guy with OM in Kosovo, chances are that he is Dongbok's friend.



This is David from Rawanda and Jae. Jae was in charge of the entertainment for the MT. Great guy - he was a great leader.




This is Dasol, Paul (grew up in California) and Anna (from China). All last semester I met with Anna three times a week. She had little to no English but here she is part of an English team. She really worked hard learning English so that she could enter the English dorm and be on an English team.


Jihye. Dad and I met her during the winter break when we taught the additional course during January.


The woman in the Handong hoodie is Naha from Napal. Beside her is YunJin. She is from Japan, she is Korean but her parents are missionaries in Japan. Beside Eunshin, sitting on the floor is Jerry, also from China.


On the couch is Shine (from Mongolia) and Sera (from Korea).

Sitting with her head down is Kate (from Russia) and to my left is Baigalmaa (from Mongolia) and Amy (from Korea). Eating supper from the floor.

This semester I am doing TEAM. This is a unique course to Handong. Students must take TEAM six semesters out of eight. They register for the course and it is worth one credit for them. This also determines where they live in dorm because students in the same TEAM live together - 3 dorm rooms in the women and men's dorms - 4 students per room. Thus my TEAM has 24 students - freshmen to seniors. I was assigned to them. These are International students or Korean students who have chosen to do English speaking TEAM because they want to improve their English or because some of them have spent time in the US or another English speaking country.

On Wednesday, we have English chapel at 3 in the afternoon which is followed by TEAM meeting. Everyone on TEAM must attend chapel and the meeting - attendance is taken. 3 misses and they fail. Last week was our first chapel and meeting. The purpose of the meeting was for introductions and to plan for MT (membership training). MT is common in Korean universities - they had this at Kyungpook also. Basically the students in the same class/year/club spend a few days together having fun and building relationship. At Kyungpook, I dreaded MT because that meant that students were so hung-over that they could barely function. This being a 'christian' university, I wasn't sure what to expect. On Wednesday we chose our MT organizers - food and entertainment. They selected a committee to help them and then went about arranging everything. I offered our house for the meal.

We meet on Friday at 6pm. The food committee came earlier to prepare food - preparing fruit salad, some kind of rice dish and Russian pancakes. Later the students arrived and the food was ordered - zimduk, fried chicken and a hot spicy stew (don't know the Korean name). We stuffed ourselves with food which we ate while sitting on the floor. All the furniture was pushed to the side and we laid out the food on newpaper on the floor and everyone sat cross legged around it to eat. After dessert and lots of talking, around 8, we moved to a classroom to play games.

The entertainment committee had prepared about 8 different games for us to play. We played the games as a team competition. One game, "How far can you go", had us spitting a mandarine orange section across the room to see who could spit it the farthest. The section had to land in tact - no manipulation. I mention this one because guess who won - Moi. Your mother is the champion of spitters. I was able to spit my orange section the furthest - clear across the room. Fortunately there was a wall on the other side or else I may have been able to go further. Unfortunately there was no prize or recognition given but I did earn my team the most points.

Here are a few pictures from the evening. I forgot to take our camera for the games but we got pictures of everyone in our apartment. There are about 9 countries represented in our group. I see that I don't have pictures of some of the people that were there. That night we had 22 people together for the meal - less for games as not everyone came for games. It was a lot of fun and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went.