Darakbang Missionary Work Association of Chaplain's Office, conducted a new type of missionary service for the post COVI
- Date2020.08.26
- 4823
The mission scholarship student team(Chaplain: Professor Hee-Kyu Heidi Park) from Darakbang Missionary Work Association of Chaplain's Office carried out a mentoring program called "Let’s be good friends" for four weeks from July 10 (Friday) to August 7 (Friday). In the middle of the pandemic, Ewha students who wanted to participate in missionary came up with a new form of missionary work and shared love.
The missionary student team had carried out educational volunteer work at home and abroad every summer and winter, it was impossible to do in the same way as before due to the pandemic. The five members of the team deeply reviewed the current situation and decided to target children from multicultural families. Min-ji Park(Department of Christian Studies), the team leader, said, “Many students lack communication with their teachers and classmates since they can’t freely go to school. We are worried of these isolated students, and that’s why we start the mentoring program.”
They sent their notice documents to the Multicultural Family Support Centers across the country and received applicants. Applicants were not only from Seoul but also from Ulsan, Shinan, and Yeongam. The missionary team then selected each mentee student and planned and conducted group activities and one-on-one mentoring activities three times a week. The whole process went online. Da-eun Choi(Department of Kinesiology and sports studies) said, "I was embarrassed at first because I had to decide pretty much everything like the themes and the contents by myself. To make matters worse, the video conference was awkward to handle. Nevertheless, we shared our opinions and reached an agreement. It was impressive and worthy that the form of missionary work had progressed week by week.”
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Group activities were conducted through video class, and they included understanding world and Korean cultures, book discussion, making hand sanitizer, excavating fossils. For one-on-one mentoring, participants took the time to communicate to meet the demand of each mentee. Yoon-ah Lee(Department of Christian Studies), said, "It was a burden because there wasn’t any fixed form of class. So I put more effort to fulfill the mentee’s request."
It was also an opportunity to experience the situation of multicultural families in Korea. It was vital to communicate with parents for elementary school students. However, some of the parents are not fluent in Korean so they sometimes had to translate the documents. In the process, they found out students from multicultural families show lower Korean and learning levels. Yoon Ye-jung (College of Nursing) Said "since children were born and raised in Korea, they weren’t culturally different from average Korean children, but their language skills were similar to those of lower grades, so we had to change the course after the initial class." Eom Ji-won Eom(Department of Christian Studies), who mentored high school students, also said, "Even though they came from multicultural families, their concerns were similar to average high school students. They wanted to know how to study, and that’s what I focused on the most during the mentoring class.”
Although it was an online mentoring program that began to replace face-to-face activities, it has its own merits. For example, since it’s an online class, students from various regions could participate, and the program could be prolonged to 4 weeks, compared to 3~4 days of face-to-face cases. Also, group activities could be carried out along with individual mentoring. As COVID-19 calls for change in communication methods among people, this new mentoring program is worthy of paying attention.