Apologies

I’ve been dealing with a number of different fires that have broken out lately, including:

• myself, then Miss Jiwaku, being quite sick in the last week and a half
• the necessity of finalizing audio tracks for the film we’re making before next Friday (though the deadline was initially today, when I was still quite ill!)
• a medical emergency with a fellow expat coworker, and all kinds of organizational (re: his family) and workplace fallout for that. (For those who know Michael, his brother has posted an update on his Facebook Wall, which is where the link above leads.)
• helping a foreign student in one of my classes who does not speak Korean, was given a scholarship and entry into a four-year-degree program, but who was barred (for no good reason) from Korean language classes
• trying to figure out the best way to organize something the school should have done itself, but will never actually do: an organization for foreign students and faculty, providing information, help, and resources to expats at the university. Aside from the student above, I’ve heard a number of reports from foreign students ranging from having been sexually assaulted by a Korean classmate (and having nobody in an official position to turn to for help) to students experiencing racist treatment by a Korean professor who did not want foreign students in her class (“We have enough Korean students in this room, we don’t need you too,” was the line quoted to me as having been said to a group of shocked and disgusted Taiwanese exchange students). We need a Foreign Community organization of some kind on campus so that people can get help, resources, and also orientations in the basics of understanding how to get by in Korea, especially given that they are living in the same slum I am, and in which our school is located, and so incidents like the racist prof or the sexual assault case don’t just end up going unaddressed like they have been so far.
• trying to get the university to provide me with a proper desk I can actually work on, like everyone else on my floor has (including people who started this semester), instead of the horrid little 1970s cramped desk I’ve had since 2006; this is the third year I’ve been actively pushing for this, and it may just happen now that I have a supervisor who realizes this problem kinda-sorta matters.

So it’s been busy. I’ll be trying to blog more consistently from now on, however…