A Nomadic Life

© 2014 Sawon Hong. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/09/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3907-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3906-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921784

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Beginning My Nomadic Life

Children in My Heart

Precious Memories

The Girl I Almost Adopted

A Four-Year-Old Girl

Yearning for Their Mothers

A Spunky Little Girl

Street Children

Get It Over with

Are We Helping or Hurting?

A Smiling Monk

Bangladesh: 1979-1980

The Red Wallet

Settling into Bangladesh

The Best of Intentions: Faux Pas #1

My Career Path Changes Direction

The Batik Shirts: Faux Pas #2

Food Pornography

Memories of Mohamed

Thailand: 1980-1982

The Problem with Flowers

Dinner Time Yet?

Coconut and Gochujang

My Favorite Greeting: Wai

No Common Language Required

The Time I Thought I Had Lost My Husband

New York: 1982-1987

Leaving China without a Passport

The Value of Children

A Midwife’s Most Prized Possession

A Tea Room in the Desert

Guns and Roses in Mirapur

Unintended Consequences

The Value of Water

The Khartoum Hilton

Looking for TBAs

A Wedding in Sudan

Two Syrian Weddings

A Bad Night’s Sleep

An Inappropriate Gift: Faux Pas #3

The Time My Husband Thought He Had Lost Me

India: 1987-1990

India International Center

Buying a Piano

Sleeping on the Roof

The Best Vegetarian Meal

A Vegetarian Wannabe

South Indian Coffee

Dengue Fever

You Can’t Be Too Careful

Looks Can Be Deceiving

Class Consciousness

Visiting Sikkim

Washington and New York: 1990-2000

Small Claims Court

Caviar, Anyone?

Vegetables, Please!

McDonald’s to the Rescue

Feeling Slavery

Sleeping through an Attempted Coup

Peace in the Middle East—Part One

A Romanian Encounter

Shingles

Paris: 2001-2002

Living in the Sixteenth

Operation Carte de Séjour

SOS Médecins

Shopping at the BHV

Shopping French Style

Bookstores in Paris

The Edith Piaf Museum

Famous Women in Paris

Washington: 2003

Swedish Hospitality

Thailand: 2004-2008

The Year That Got Away from Me

Parle-t-on Français Ici?

Learning to Speak Thai

Beating the Traffic in Bangkok

Adventures at the Thailand Cultural Centre

Water Festivals

Peace in the Middle East—Part Two

Ladies’ Rooms

Karaoke Diplomacy

In the Wake of a Tsunami

Smoking in Bulgaria

A Very Violent Place

We Say Sorry

Parting with Books

Being Korean

Joining the UN As a Korean

My Censored Travelogue

Giving Up My Korean Passport

But Where Are You Really from?

Postscript

Acknowledgements

For my mother

whose inquisitiveness traveled with me

Preface

When I was young, my mother had a fortuneteller read my fortune. Although I don’t recall much of that session, I clearly remember how disappointed I was when the fortuneteller told me that I wasn’t a wanderlust kind of person. This reaction revealed that what I really wanted in life, even from an early age, was to travel the world. Which I surely have done.

I was born and raised in Korea, a divided small country which was recovering from the war. I went to a graduate program in the US—a not-so-common phenomenon for a young woman at the time. When I returned to Korea after five years, I expected to stay there. This rather straightforward life trajectory got diverted unexpectedly by marriage to an American. That’s when the fortuneteller proved to be wrong and my unarticulated yearning came true.

Throughout my thirty-plus years of living, working, and traveling around the world, I encountered many entrancing situations and met all sorts of people who touched my heart, made me think, and taught me core lessons about life. I would like to share some of these memories with my family and friends from whom I have been away so often and so long. In this way, I want them to have a glimpse of life I have lived. I also hope that my stories show young people who might be interested in working internationally what it’s like to live and work outside your own culture.

This collection is my way of saying thanks to those who have added richness and meaning to my life.

Sawon Hong

Beginning My Nomadic Life

With a Down syndrome boy in a Korean village

My nomadic life actually started before my marriage. It began in the mid-1970s, when I did field work for my doctoral dissertation in a remote village in the southeastern corner of my own country, Korea. To my surprise, the villagers there treated me as if I were a foreigner. They made a clear distinction between themselves and me: "You are a Seoul-minkuk saram (a Seoul Special City national), they said, and we are Daehan minkuk saram" (Korean nationals). Although we spoke the same language—with different accents—I really was a foreigner to them, for a couple of reasons. First, I came from Seoul, which to them was a far-off, elite, exclusive world. Second, I had studied and lived in the United States; they had seen few, if any, people who had ever gone abroad, especially not a young woman like me. So, to them I was an outlander, and they treated me like one.

The good thing about my outsider status was that it freed me from having to conform to their values and behavioral norms; that is, I was not judged by their strict standards and strongly held traditional beliefs. For example, I was allowed to participate in male-only activities that excluded local women. I was even invited to talk with the head of the village, a highly regarded old man who was very conservative and had never spoken to any women outside his family.

It took some time before the villagers began to treat me as though I was one of them. Even then I was never fully accepted. They joked that I was too well educated to attract a husband and that the only person who would marry me was someone they called the village idiot, a ten-year-old boy with Down syndrome, who, with his big innocent smile, followed me wherever I went.

I loved this village life and these tradition-bound villagers: they were so different from my city life, so captivating and challenging, so much to teach me. Over time, I grew comfortable with their way of life and recognized both good and bad in them and in me. This eye-opening experience introduced and prepared me, at least to a degree, for my eventual nomadic life. After all, isn’t understanding and accepting differences among people a key to working in unfamiliar environments?

I remember that even at a very young age, for reasons I cannot explain, I felt a special emotional connection with the underprivileged: maids, physical laborers, small-scale merchants, neighbors who were poor, and children who were needy. After I had studied sociology in college, that compassion became more explicitly focused on women and children, and the issues affecting them.

How lucky I was to be able to combine my innate curiosity with my compassion for hapless children and women in my professional life. For three decades, I worked with a number of international development agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Population Council, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). More than half of that time was with UNICEF in several different positions. UNICEF is an agency mandated by the United Nations General Assembly to advocate for the protection of children’s rights and to help meet their basic needs. It was founded in December 1946 as the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to respond to the millions of displaced and refugee children deprived of shelter and food in the aftermath of World War II. Its official name has changed but the well-known acronym UNICEF remains. As of 2013, UNICEF’s work is carried out in 191 countries, and some 88 per cent of the organization’s staff are located in the field. In everything it does, the most disadvantaged children and the countries in greatest need have priority.

I had the opportunity to visit countries in nearly every region of the world; the majority were underdeveloped. My visits to some places were brief (the shortest was a 36-hour visit to Guinea), while others consisted of repeated and lengthy stays. The experiences that influenced me the most were those in Bangladesh, Thailand, and India, where I learned that visiting a place and living in it are two entirely different things. As a visitor, I stayed in hotels arranged by host governments or local offices, was driven from place to place in official cars, and was aided by local colleagues. These brief, pampered visits were comparatively easy and stress free. And even when they were difficult—which they often were, since field trips usually involved extreme heat, dust, bumpy roads, limited food of questionable safety, mosquitoes, and security problems—they didn’t last more than a few days. On the other hand, even with the support of my office and colleagues, I found that living in a poor foreign country where climatic, health, and basic living conditions were often difficult to cope with was a totally different experience.

Children in My Heart

Children from Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, Senegal, and Sikkim

Despite differences in culture, level of poverty, and political situation, the circumstances surrounding children across the world have many similarities. While there has been remarkable progress in the treatment of disadvantaged children, it is also true that no matter how hard everyone works, there are always children who need protection and support.

Wherever I traveled in connection with my work—developing, monitoring, or evaluating projects, training staff, or attending conferences—I made it a practice to visit as many villages, small towns, urban slums, schools, kindergartens, clinics, children’s centers, and children’s prisons and detention centers, as I could. Visits to well-run childcare centers provided me with immense pleasure and even a ray of optimism. Such positive feelings counted for a lot, given the struggle of poor countries to cope with the needs of their abused and badly treated children.

Precious Memories

In most of the places I visited on field trips, the people were extremely hospitable, no matter how impoverished they were. Even the poorest villagers tried to offer something to eat or drink. Maybe it was just some water in a dented cup, handed to me by a deeply wrinkled or dirty hand. But such a simple gesture meant more to me than all the multi-course meals at fancy government banquets and other official thank-you’s I received.

One day my colleagues and I visited a transition center for trafficked children in Poipet, Cambodia, right on the Thailand-Cambodia border. Cambodian children under age 18 who had been rescued from traffickers were temporarily housed at this center. While waiting to be placed in more permanent homes or facilities, they were given vocational training. The materials were supplied by local charities, and the teachers were trained with support from international aid agencies. On the day we arrived, a group of young girls and boys were learning how to make two types of jewelry: one with beads, the other with glass. Despite the horrors they had experienced, the children looked just like any other children.

As we were leaving after watching the class awhile, a girl about five or six years old ran up to me and softly nudged my arm. Then she held up a bracelet and pushed it into my hand. I glanced at her teacher, who gestured for me to take it. Through the interpreter, the teacher told me that this little girl really wanted to give me the bracelet she had just made. A little boy immediately raised his arm, holding up a blue necklace and shouting something. The teacher, smiling at the boy, nodded her head again. Then the boy rushed toward me. I bent down so he could hang the necklace around my neck. Emotion welled up, and the tears streamed down.

Now the beautiful green-glass bracelet and the blue-bead necklace are displayed on my closet door. They are the most valued souvenirs I have of the years I spent working with children in various parts of the world. These simple tokens remind me for whom I worked and why.

The Girl I Almost Adopted

In all my encounters with children of different nationalities, genders, races, colors, ages, and cultural backgrounds, I was tempted only once to adopt a child.

It was during an official visit to a halfway house for girls in Suva, the capital city of Fiji. In Fiji, after serving more than half of their sentences in prison, school-age children who had committed crimes—both petty and deadly serious—were moved into halfway houses segregated by gender. This was part of a pilot project intended to provide juveniles with a smooth transition back into society. Some of the children were attending school, while others held jobs, depending on their age and previous experiences.

Our group visited the boys’ house first. It was a small building, relatively well equipped with individual beds, clean toilets and bath facilities, and a communal kitchen/dining area. As we were leaving, a boy with a heavily pimpled face timidly approached the Director of Social Welfare. He had been so quiet that he hadn’t attracted my attention until then. He said something in the local language; he seemed to be pleading for something, and the director’s response to him was brusque and dismissive. I asked her what he was saying and who he was. He was 12 years old and had been deserted by his divorced parents. Although he had not committed any crime, he was being kept in this facility since he had no home.

He wants to know whether he could come with us to see his sister, the director said.

He has a sister? Where?

His younger sister stays at another halfway house. Like this one, but for girls.

Isn’t that where we are going next?

Yes, but he cannot visit her there. It’s only for girls.

Could you please make an exception? I pleaded. He wants to visit with his sister. Neither of them has committed any crimes, and they only have each other.

Reluctantly, the director allowed the boy to come with us.

The boys’ halfway house wasn’t as bad as I had expected, but the girls’ house was almost idyllic: it was a mansion set on a huge, beautifully landscaped property, which had been donated by a rich landowner. It was a calm and soothing place. Any pain could be healed here, I thought. The friendly manager greeted us at the gate and led us to the house.

At the entrance, a half-dozen smiling teen-age girls were waiting for us. They were dressed just like any other teenagers, wearing jeans and T-shirts. One young girl who was standing behind the older ones was smiling at me. I was immediately drawn to her because of her dazzling smile and sweet face. Then, I realized that she wasn’t smiling at me. She was smiling at the boy, who was standing right behind me. She was his sister. When I beckoned to her to come over to greet her brother, she went right up to him and held his hand, beaming and looking up at him.

How could a parent not want to keep his or her own children, especially a sweet girl like her? I wondered. I had a strong urge to ask about adopting her right there and then. But after further exploring the stories of these two children, I learned that their aunt, who was living in Auckland with her New Zealander husband, was already in the process of adopting both of them. As soon as the school term ended, the children would move to New Zealand.

Occasionally, I still think of that magical nine-year-old girl and hope that she and her loving brother are living happily together.

A Four-Year-Old Girl

As the regional advisor for child protection in UNICEF’s regional office, I was in Manila, leading a team of visitors from UNICEF’s Italian National Committee, which raises funds for UNICEF. One of our stops was at a childcare center run by a group of Catholic nuns—a big house with a beautiful garden in a residential area. It was an exceptionally pleasant and home-like setting, unlike most institutional childcare centers.

Smiling brightly, a couple of nuns in white habits welcomed us at the gate. As they ushered us into the back room, it felt as if I were walking into a forest. An entire wall was painted with tall trees, waterfalls, shiny stones, and birds. Someone had created this beautiful sanctuary for abused children right in the middle of Manila.

About a dozen healthy-looking girls, dressed in the teenage standard blue jeans and T-shirts, were waiting in the living room. The head nun announced that these girls had prepared a song-and-dance routine for us, which they had been practicing all week. As they performed, the girls giggled in embarrassment, covering their mouths with their hands.

The performance was entirely on religious themes, which at first made me uncomfortable: Are the nuns forcing the children into Catholicism? I wondered. I finally decided that even if that were true, at least the girls were well fed and safe. They didn’t know that one of the visitors (a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador) was a famous singer from Italy, but as soon as she started singing for and with them, there was instant rapport. And although only a couple of girls spoke