Korea – Page 2 – Peace Corps Worldwide

RPCV Gerry Krzic “We left Korea, but Korea never left us”

Sep 02 2020

By Gerry Krzic who teaches at Ohio University and serves as the president of Friends of Korea. He was a PCV in Korea from 1977 to 1980. Gerry Krzic teaches at Daechang Middle School in Yecheon County, North Gyeongsang Province, in 1977. / Courtesy of Gerry Krzic Anyone who has spent time in Korea has probably heard of “jeong,” a concept characterized as a collective emotion of caring, love, attachment ― an unspoken bond difficult to define but evident when seen in action. Jeong is usually described in different forms such as jeong between friends (woojeong) and between mother and child (mojeong). I would like to offer another form of jeong ― Peace Corps jeong ― permeating in a subset of American society. That is, Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Korea from 1966 to 1981. I returned in 2013 for a one-week Revisit Korea Program sponsored by . . .

Review — MUKHO MEMORIES by Don Haffner (Korea)

Aug 23 2017

Mukho Memories: A Peace Corps/Korea Memoir by Don Haffner (Korea 1972–75) Dog Ear Publishing May 2017 406 pages $20.00 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Clifford Garstang (Korea 1976–77) • MUKHO MEMORIES BY DON HAFFNER (Korea, 1972–75) is the fourth or fifth Peace Corps Korea memoir I’ve read. While the personalities of the authors make each distinct, these volumes (and likely Peace Corps memoirs about other countries of service as well) all tell roughly the same story: idealistic young American comes to an under-developed country, discovers the wonders and peculiarities of the place, and returns home forever changed by the experience. As a Korea RPCV myself (I arrived in Korea a few months after Haffner left), my own memories are quite similar to Haffner’s: the anxiety of being outside the US for the first time, in a non-English speaking country, no less; the triple-whammy shock of new cuisine, new culture, and . . .

Review — LEARNING TO LOVE KIMCHI by Carol MacGregor Cissel (Korea)

May 25 2016

Learning to Love Kimchi: Letters Home from a Peace Corps Volunteer Carol MacGregor Cissel (Korea 1973–75) CreateSpace May 2016 274 pages $10.99 (paperback), $4.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Clifford Garstang (Korea 1976–77) • CAROL CISSEL EMBARKED on her Peace Corps odyssey in December, 1973. “We’re in Korea!” she writes home to her mother upon arrival after a journey through Honolulu and Tokyo with her service group. This exclamation forms the opening of Cissel’s memoir, Learning to Love Kimchi. What follows are all the letters she wrote to her mother over the course of her two years working in Korea as an education Volunteer and the months spent touring Southeast Asia after the completion of her service. My own Peace Corps/Korea experience began just a few days after Cissel left the country, so I read these letters with considerable fondness and nostalgia, remembering my own first taste of kimchi, my own . . .

Ernesto Butcher (Korea 1968-70) Unsung by the Peace Corps

May 26 2014

You most likely have never heard of Ernesto Butcher unless you were a PCV in South Korea in 1968-70, or you worked for the New York Port Authority in the days of 9/11. I never heard of him until Dick Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64) alerted me to Ernesto Butcher’s obituary in The New York Times on Saturday, May 24, 2014. Ernesto Butcher died on May 15 in Maplewood, N.J. He was 69. He apparently had a heart attack while jogging according to his wife, Kristen Peck Butcher. Most RPCV operate (with some exceptions) in the shadow of fame or notoriety and are content on getting the job done. Perhaps it is a hangover from working in totally obscurity in faraway villages of the world and just being satisfied with what can be accomplished without a lot of fanfare. Ernesto Butcher appears to have been that sort of guy, and it has . . .