After spending few days in Bangladesh in end-December, I returned to Seoul in the early morning of the new-year. As soon as I entered my apartment, I got a phone call from my Burmese student Nay Tun that Prof. Jin Young-Jong had invited MAINS students for a lunch at his home. He might have forgotten to invite me. But I decided to join them.

Only three students joined the party. I learned that the Koreans eat rice-cake soup in the new-year day. It’s very symbolic. The soup elevates one by one year of age and the children love to become more “matured”. The soup we had in Prof. Jin’s house contained beef and he mentioned it three times that he had to buy expensive beef for the soup as some of us don’t eat pork, which is much cheaper.

We met Prof. Jin’s wife and two kids, two little devils. In the beginning, they were too shy, but soon they appeared in their original form. 
         
Koreans en masse observe lunar new-year, which has been a tradition for ages, though this is more known as the Chinese new-year. This year the school had a prolonged holiday from 6 February, for almost a week. Koreans usually visit their parents, grand-parents and other elders and spend time with respective families. This reminds me of the Chuseok holiday in the autumn when most Koreans visited their ancestral home and met their elders in the family.
During the lunar holiday, I got a mail from Ki-tae, the 12-year old boy whom I met in Jeju Island in last October. He was with his mom and was complaining to me that he didn’t have a girlfriend yet. I am reproducing here what he wrote.

January-February has been too cold for me, as I have come from a sub-tropical environment. Our winter in Bangladesh is short-lived and the barometer hardly drops below 15 degree Celsius. Here in Seoul, it has been minus in most evenings and mornings.

                                      
                                      

Though I had been traveling a lot, I witnessed snowfall here for the first time in my life. Once it snowed continuously for two days. In one morning I saw that the backyard of my apartment building was fully covered in white. Even after few days, I could see snow on the piece of stone with SKHU inscription in the calligraphy of Prof. Shin Young-bok. Despite the cold winter, I enjoyed it, as most of the days are sunny.


KDF workshop

Korea Democracy Foundation (KDF) organized the 1st International Consultation Meeting for the Co-operative Program Development of the KDF On 2-3 February. KDF is a government-sponsored foundation and Prof. Lee Jung-Ok, Co-Chair of ARENA, is in charge of the KDF’s international cooperation program. She invited, among others, several ARENA Fellows. In that sense, it was sort of a reunion of some friends over a workshop. The venue was a posh hotel in the downtown and I was asked by the organizers to shift to the hotel suite for few days as they considered my place to be “far away” from the venue. I was asked to prepare a paper on Bangladesh poverty and micro-credit.

Fr. Ham Sei-Ung, President of KDF, greeted me in the first morning. We met once before in his office. He is a very humble and friendly person and commands respect.

KDF was founded in 2001 by the government through an Act passed by the national parliament “to extend and develop the spirit of democratization movement”. KDF is planning to “globalize” its visibility through a host of projects and likes to contribute to developing and disseminating discourses and experiences on democratization process in and beyond Korea. 

 

ACIS

I have spent many hours at ARENA office. We call it ACIS (ARENA Center in Seoul). It means we may have more centers at different places. In the recently-held board meeting, we discussed and decided to continue our office in Hong Kong, as it provides us the only legal status. Cynthia volunteered to take care of all odd jobs there. I proposed to Cynthia that we might name it as ARENA Center in China (ACIC).

ARENA has now two fulltime staff, Francis and Jiyoung, though Francis has not been receiving salary for quite some time. There is no money to pay him. In that sense, Jiyoung is the richest person in ACIS. Soo-ryeon works as a part-time accountant and is paid on an hourly basis. Others are “volunteers”. Two of them are expected to join as full-time program officer from March. One of them, Bonojit (India), has just finished his graduation in MAINS and the other, Toshiko (Japan), was a part-time staff for sometime in 2006. In my personal opinion, Bonojit has been the best MAINS student in terms of academic performance and value that we hold. Alex (Korea) is another volunteer with high potential. If he agrees to join the team as a program officer, it would definitely enrich the team.

Jiyoung and Soo-ryeon are also SKHU students in the graduate and under-graduate level respectively. They have skipped some semesters to work and save money as study in SKHU is quite expensive. They are in their twenties and they keep the office moving and lively. Jiyoung identifies herself as a “young feminist”. Soo-ryeon is very young, but seems to be a very good organizer and dependable as well. 

Bukansan is a mountain in the northern outskirts of Seoul. ARENA staff/volunteers organized a day trip to Bukansan as a “farewell tribute” to me. On 10 February, five of us went for the mountain hiking. Among others were Jiyoung, Soo-ryeon, Jong-jin and Miran.

The slopes of the mountain were full of evergreen pine trees. We climbed for about two hours and reached one peak. We rested there for a while and had lunch that they brought. From there, we saw many hikers climbing the highest peak of Hyangnorobang. There was another peak adjacent to where we stopped, the Jokaduri. We saw three men were climbing using ropes and other gears.

We took a detour to come down. I found it more difficult than climbing. I fell down once, but I was not hurt. A few minutes later, I heard a big sound; it was the fall of Su-ryeon, but without any damage to her body.

The weather was perfect for hiking. It was sunny and not too cold, maybe minus five. We took a long walk after getting down, entered a restaurant and had some snacks and makgeoli (white rice wine).


ARENA board meeting

The third meeting of the present ARENA executive board (AEB) was held in Seoul on 4-5 February. All members were present. We discussed many issues. The body language of the members is no less important than what we read in the minutes. I tried to capture some of the moments with my camera. EED phenomenon is still haunting and is yet to be resolved. We also spent much time to discuss MAINS and how to improve it further. The AEB endorsed Margaret (China) as the visiting faculty for spring 2008. 

My office

I was allocated a room in the SeunyeonKwan building (the main administrative building) which has been named after a former board member of the SKHU, built with a grant from him. This gentleman, a priest although, became a news headline in last summer as he, with a group of musclemen, mercilessly punched a guy that had a scuffle with his son.

  

This building is numbered as ‘1’ and my office is numbered as 1304. Oh Jaeshik, the Dean of MAINS and a senior ARENA Fellow, had been using the room. Now he uses his own office at the Asia Institute in the downtown, though his name in Korean still glitters on the door along with my name (not spelled properly). I pasted a few stickers on the door that characterize my taste and temperament. One of the stickers I got from my Indian friend, Willy. It carries an anti-war message showing a kid releasing urine on the helmet of a soldier.

Often MAINS students alone or in a group come to my office, mostly for non-academic purpose, and chat with me. I enjoy it as it refreshes me.  My Burmese student Nay Tun once brought a bagful of instant coffee and paper cups so that they can have coffee as and when they need. Prof. Cho Hee-yeon’s office is on the opposite side of the corridor. But he seldom shows up and pretends to be busy. Between 11 and 12, I usually receive a call from Francis or Jiyoung and often we go to the school cafeteria together for lunch. Sometimes I call and say jeomshim mogeukshida (let’s have lunch). The menu is written in Korean on the wall on the top of sample dishes and they check it for me whether it’s halal.
 
I spend most of the daytime in my office, say, seven hours per day on the average. In the summer and autumn, I used to return to my apartment at around eight or nine in the evenings. Even in the weekend I spent many hours at my office. There are wide windows on two sides and sunlight penetrates for the whole day and keeps me warm. I could see the hills, the trees, the sky, the front door of the church and, of course, the students and I go back to my apartment, mainly to sleep and to have a shower.

I’ll miss my office where I have spent over two thousand hours.


MAINS

I joined MAINS by accident. I was neither involved in its conceptualization, nor in initial planning. I had no idea what were the discussions in the last ARENA Congress, as I was absent. When it was decided around early January 2007 that I would come for MAINS, by that time the academic and logistics infrastructure were more or less complete. When I arrived in early March, I started adapting to a given framework that was decided independent of me, particularly in terms of selection of students and the courses.

Theoretically there have been two parties involved, ARENA and SKHU. I have not seen any document that clearly spells out who would do what. I also don’t expect that everything could be in a perfect order right from the beginning. The point I like to make is that things had been in a rudimentary form and I did not have much scope to help design the course in a perfect manner. I brought bagful of books and report from Bangladesh and to prepare reference book for the courses.

Several fellows have expressed their willingness to be part of the MAINS in an advisory capacity and signed for the program on “ARENA Regional Schools/Inter-Asia University Project”. A detailed plan of action was proposed in the last congress (see 2006 ACF Congress report, pp 21-23). These were not adequately followed up or implemented. There was no functional program team in line with the ARENA practice that involves a group of fellows facilitated by a program officer for each program. I had to use my commonsense and my own style of management that I had acquired in last thirty years.

One year has passed. I have received encouraging notes from many Fellows. Also I received sporadic remarks from some fellows on what went wrong and what should have been done. The problem is that, I have not yet received any specific and written outline on the curriculum that can be pursued in the following year.

By the time I arrived, there had already been a change in Co-Directorship. Prof. Hur Song-woo was replaced by Prof. Jin Young-jong. The later was also not involved in the preliminary planning. In the beginning, we tried to develop a harmonious relationship among two of us, the two Co-Directors. Prof. Jin informed the students that he would be mainly responsible for all administrative and logistic matters and I was asked to look after mainly academic aspects. I have also tried to get a sense of the course and the problems encountered by the students from their real life experiences. I had an opportunity to engage with all of them on a day-to-day basis and I am in a position to draw some conclusions with relatively more precision and authority.

My propositions are very simple. Once we accept and enroll a student, it’s our responsibility to help her/him. If someone is not found with “sound background and capacity”, we cannot ignore her/him. Nor we can produce miracles in one year. I don’t think we can pull the “best” of the students from Asia. Perhaps they eye on Harvard or Cambridge. We have to understand this phenomenon. I don’t see any reason, why they would come to SKHU. However, we can bring some good candidates if we, the Fellows, carefully and seriously hunt for them. Unfortunately we have not done that. Despite my written request to all Fellows, I received only one nomination from one Fellow and he was selected for the 2008 program. Almost all the candidates have browsed through the website and then applied. There maybe few more who were informed about the program by our Fellows. But I am not aware of that. Usually students apply to several institutions and those who apply for SKHU have a higher probability of getting selected, as SKHU is not well-known in the region and does not receive too many applications.

In my opinion, MAINS is not comparable to institutions with “high academic excellence”. Here we, in my personal opinion, try to provide a space to social activists to interact and learn from each other’s experience. In this sense, this is unique. MAINS has a potential to become an excellent breeding ground for future ARENA Fellows. We need new and young Fellows to keep ARENA going. In that sense, current Fellows can play a positive role by recommending suitable young candidates.

Another principle I had been following from the beginning is not to let students know how much I know. On the first day, I made it clear to my students that there is no reason to assume that I know more than them. We could learn from each other’s experience and wisdom. And we can be good friends too, without maintaining any hierarchy. I learned in the seventies from Paulo Freire that the teacher should bean an animator and an outsider must not be able to identify who is a student and who is a teacher. They’re all part of the same team. In the beginning, few students called me by my first name and the others addressed me as sir or professor. At the end, more students became comfortable with my name; though some continued calling me professor, but no more ‘sir’.

In MAINS, candidates from NGO background are sought. But all NGOs are not active in social movements. Some are even worse than government or commercial organizations, where staff do routine jobs in exchange of pay. For them, MAINS is just another opportunity to have another diploma.

I may have many limitations. But I tried. In the beginning, Francis Lee suggested me to write diary, which was an excellent idea to communicate with Fellows. I don’t feel too comfortable with writing reports. I try to write in an informal way using my limited vocabulary, as English has not been my first language. Sometimes I felt frustrated, as I was not receiving enough response. I don’t know how many Fellows read my diary. I have received comments from not too many of them, and I am grateful to them. But nobody informed me yet that I had been writing nonsense. Maybe they are too polite or too busy. But I had always been in touch with senior Korean Fellows including Prof. Lee Seejae, Prof. Samuel Lee, Prof. Oh Jaeshik and Prof. Lee Jung OK. Despite their busy schedule, they inquired about me and my “welfare”.

As I was staying alone at my Seoul apartment, I could devote much of my time for MAINS. I always tried to understand how much they could absorb. I could not use the “best” of them as my sample for envisioning a curriculum. I had to think of the “worst” too. Majority of them had never studied in English medium before and we were expecting them to write essays and theses in good English. We perhaps demanded too much from them.

As I shall be leaving in a couple of days, I have no hesitation to confess that my one-year stay at SKHU for MAINS was extremely rewarding. I learned a lot. I learned about the plight of the people in Burma; I can see it through the eyes of my Burmese student Nay Tun who has been living here as a refugee for last fifteen years with a dream to return in a free environment. I discovered Mongolia’s nomadic people living in ger through the expressions of my Mongolian student Manda; I had no prior knowledge of that country except the fact that once upon a time there was a conqueror named Chinggis Khan. I learned from my Malysian student Badrul Hisham how devastating was the national security law in Malaysia; I knew of Malaysia as a mere economic miracle. I learned from my Thai student Pinpaka that the anti-Thaksin coup was a response to the challenge of the political system against the military-monarchy unholy alliance; I had an idea that Thaksin regime was too corrupt; though I know that the military is thousand times more corrupt. I learned from my Indian student Bonojit about the extreme apathy of the mainstream Indian intelligentsia towards the people of Northeast India; but I had no knowledge of the intellectual apartheid that discriminates the Northeast to such an alarming extent. I knew that this region is being ruled by the Indian military for last fifty years as an inner colony. I always feel proud of my Indonesian student Nur Kholis, as I often mention that my student is the youngest commissioner of the national human rights commission in Indonesia. I learned form my Korean student Ik-Su, how benign, innocent and caring a young Korean can be; I had a prior assumption that Korea is a consumer society devoid of any heart and soul. I found my Philippino student Jessica to be a good friend, rather than a student, who came with a rich background of human rights movement. I have seen my Sri Lankan student Nilani always smiling and helping others and I learned from her that every NGO boss is a Hitler. My Bangladeshi student Mamun had been very homesick in the beginning. But he overcame this soon. He had a special style of dancing. He could entertain all of us with a very good sense of humor. Hyo-woo, another Korean student, actually looks like a professor. He is a well-known NGO leader. Drinking has been his passion. Once I was in doubt whether he would continue. But he did.

I had difficulty with one student. She had been complaining against fellow students and teachers from the first week to the end. Keeping her in mind, I strongly suggest that understanding of and exposure to cross-cultural environment is important for selecting students for MAINS.

However, I would particularly mention about two students, Jang Ik-Su and Nay Tun Naing. They extended support to me whenever I needed and I asked for. Ik-Su was “partially” funded by SKHU in line with policy for other graduate schools. As he was a Korean, he was not “entitled” to full scholarship. I don’t know who decided it and when. I am not aware of any written document on that. Ik-Su has a family with three children and he had to incur debt to pay for his studies. If SKHU continues to follow the same policy, it may not get any student for MAINS from Korea. I have heard that Korean students may receive some additional support this year.

I salute Nay Tun for keeping up his high morale and motivation for last fifteen years as a “refugee”. He could migrate to Europe or Canada as many of his friends did and lead a comfortable life. Many “revolutionaries” do that and return to the homeland as “hero” when there is an “opportunity”. I have experienced that tens of thousands of students and political leaders spent the entire period in Indian camps during our liberation war of 1971 and returned to free Bangladesh as “freedom fighter” only after the end of the war, while many of their friends had been engaged in the war in a very hostile environment. Nay Tun decided to stay closer to Burma and continue his political struggle for the freedom of Burmese people. He has been exhausting his prime youth with a hope to realize a dream. 

And I have seen wonderful souls amongst the SKHU faculty. I don’t want to mention their names separately. Despite high morale and academic background, they have been spending their time more intensively here with much lower pay compared to other Korean universities. These are the positive and sweet memories that I’ll always cherish. But I also see a danger. I have a feeling that a small group is trying to “own” MAINS without mainstreaming it at SKHU. I would be happy if I am proved wrong. I also think that MAINS at SKHU should not be the end of the world for ARENA, rather we should help SKHU to develop a capacity to deal with it, and we should look for other institutions for replicating our program in some form or other.

However, as a Co-Director, I also feel responsible for all the shortcomings, though many things were beyond my grip. But I do not want to make any excuse. However, I would leave with a sense of complacence that I have contributed to some extent in laying the foundation of the course, like a mason. MAINS will take few more years to be firmly grounded. Things would certainly develop and flourish on my sweat and tears. I don’t know whether I’ll be remembered. If not, I shall not regret. My job was to carry a mission up to a certain height. I still believe that I have accomplished it. And, in this context, I like to quote the Korean poet Young-woon Han (translated by Chang-soo Ko).



          I am a ferryboat.
          You’re my passenger.
          You tread on me with muddy feet.
          I cross the river, hugging you in my arms.
          When you are in my arms,
          I do not care
          Whether the river is deep, shallow or rapid.
          If you do not come,
          I wait for you from morning till night,
          Exposed to winds and wet with snow or rain.
          Once you reach the other bank,
          You go away without looking back.
          But I know you will come back some day.
          So I grow old, waiting for you day and night.
          I am a ferry boat.
          You’re my passenger.



O Seoul my Seoul

When I think of Seoul in my leisure hours, I imagine a rustic woman. I don’t see the green hills, the yellow skyscrapers, the fast-moving cars, the bustling shopping malls and the workaholics running through the stairs in subway stations. I see a dream-girl with all the treasures of beauty, passion and mystery. I’ll be gone. But I would long for her as she had held me with her tender arms for 350 days. In the words of Tagore, I want to reveal my heart. 

          I know you know you were known to me 
          O maiden of a distant land
          You lived afar beyond that sea
          O maiden of a distant land.
          I have seen you on an autumn morning
          have seen you on a summer-night O darling
          I have seen you
          In the closet of heart I see
          O maiden of a distant land.
          I have let ears unto sky and heard 
          Heard heard you saw I have heard
          I have offered to you my heart
          O maiden of a distant land.
          Wandering over the earth
          I have reached a new-found heart
          At door a guest I happen to be
          O maiden of a distant land.

Reflections

It has been a long stay; one year. I had never lived for such a long time outside my home town. During this period, everything didn’t go well. I had pleasant moments, as well as bitter ones. Sometimes I had a feeling of not being consulted properly, being ignored or bypassed. Sometimes I had to work under pull-push pressures. But there had been more occasions to feel happy.

I had a different opinion in many respects with people in SKHU and ACIS. But I always tried not to follow a confrontational approach. Because I never conceived SKHU or ARENA as end of the world. I had been with ARENA since 1983. I have been with several regional networks with varying backgrounds and constituencies. Some exclusively deal with practitioners, some with campaigners, some with scholars and some with a mixed audience. All these are uniquely positioned. But all have the same class background; urban middle class. We talk about people; most people don’t know us or not aware of what we do or talk about. In our progress reports, we claim to achieve milestones every now and then. Often we pretend to be too big in our too small enclaves.

In my opinion, The Communist Manifesto of Marx-Engels is the best scholarly testament of the modern era for intellectual-activists. Because it’s too simple, too direct, can be communicated easily and, not the least, is capable of inciting movements. In my summer course on Critical Understanding of Culture in Asia, I included one essay of Tagore, “On Religion”. In my course on Globalization, Ecology and Development, I included another essay of Tagore, "On Nature". These are very good reading materials to learn a world view. My mission has been to be a good human being and to help within my limited capacity and scope to help others to become good human beings. When I think of “isms”, I think of “humanism”. I say, I am a human being; humanity is my religion. All other identities are either accidental (like gender, race, religion), or imposed (like citizenship), or market-driven (where I sell my labor power in exchange of salary/wage; scholars get honorarium and not wage). I never pretended to be a pundit, nor did I ever conceive a school as a breeding ground of  pundits.

In my early twenties, I had an opportunity to systematically study communist literature in my MA course and I fell in love with the poems of Marx. I translated many of his poems in my language. I admire him most for the reason that he despised philistine mentality throughout his life. He hated people who pretended to be something that they were not.


Farewell

Graduation ceremony at SKHU was held on 14 February. Since then the countdown started. SKHU hosted a dinner on 14^th. Students and ARENA staff gathered in my apartment on 15^th evening and stayed for almost the whole night. We spent some of our final moments together free from all “pressure”. 

As I was preparing to leave Seoul, I have been receiving personal notes from friends with whom I had an opportunity to interact to varying extent. They might have been very kind to me and might have ignored all my shortcomings. I feel tempted to cite some of these as I also want to put these on record.

(Research Professor, Democracy and Social Movement Institute, SKHU)

---

I salute your heroic endeavor in this program and university.
Given the hardship you may have encountered in your role as a co-director your achievement far outweighs our expectation by any standards.
You will be greatly missed and respected by all who are fortunate enough to have known you.
I take my hat off to you!
Yours sincerely,
Hyo-Je Cho
(Professor, Graduate School of NGO Studies, SKHU)

---

Dear Mohi,
It was nice having you at KWDI last year and I would miss our enjoyable discussions. It is only to my regrets that our friendship had not many opportunities to get stronger.


Hyeseon
(Researcher, Korean Women’s Development Institute)

---

Hyeran
(Chief of Education and Training, APCEIU)

---

Dear Mohi,
Your mail on the subject stimulated a mixed feeling in me.
Coincidentally, this is a week many Koreans must be ready for 'homebound' move.
It may have been too long for you but it was a short period for us.
You have done a good work in establishing the MAINS program and we will do our best to make it develop further and to help Koreans build closer solidarity with people of Asia.
We will soon be placed with distance in between.
Yet, we have built remarkable friendship that will keep us in touch beyond distance and will push us move towards common 'homebound' 
Bon Voyage!!
Jaeshik

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I have been trekking through a trail of an unknown world. Wherever I go, whomever I meet, whatever I see, I like to absorb and then again move forward. I had been to Seoul for very short periods since 1996 as many as five times before joining MAINS. But I started understanding a different Seoul during this prolonged stay. I might have made some friends and some foes as well. But I like to leave with a sense of satisfaction and pride, if I have ever earned it. Again I like to borrow from Tagore to say my last words.