For an hour every Saturday, Room 252 Sayles-Hill is not just another Carleton classroom. Instead, it's a place where Northfield Korean adoptees and their siblings can learn about Korean culture from Korean and Korean American college students.
Korean music plays from a laptop computer as volunteers show kids how to fold bright squares of paper into carnations. "What's the song about?" asks one child. "It's about a teacher's generosity and how the teacher cares about each student," answers volunteer Sung-Wook Hwang, a freshman from Gwangmyeong, Korea.
Hwang is part of a volunteer effort called the Korean Adoptee Program, organized by the Korean Students Association through Carleton's Acting in the Community Together program. KAP exposes Korean adoptees to their birth culture and language, in addition to providing them with positive role models.
Northfield residents Mike and Nancy Carriell have been taking their son, Casey, to Korean Adoptee Program sessions for more than four years. "And we've appreciated every year of it," Nancy says. She and Mike adopted Casey from Korea in 1999, when he was eight months old. While she was growing up in Northfield, says Nancy, Carleton students often acted as mentors to her, and she's happy her son is having a similar experience.
"It says a lot that the students take part of their Saturday to be with our kids," says Cannon Falls parent Jackie Kochevar. She and her husband, Keith, adopted sons Kory and Owen in the late 1990s. Each Saturday they bring the boys and their sister, Anna, to the program to learn about Korean culture. "Getting to know other kids who are also adopted from Korea may help their self-esteem," says Jackie, "especially since we don't live in a very diverse community."
Korean Adoptee Program co-director Joo Ree Richards, a sophomore from St. Paul, knows what that's like. She also spent much of her childhood in a small town with little diversity—Spearfish, South Dakota. But each year she got to attend Korean culture camp in Minneapolis, where she learned from older Korean Americans. She hopes that the Carleton program will have the same effect on Northfield's Korean adoptees."If this program is the only exposure [to other Asian Americans] they have, that makes it all the more important," says Richards.
Co-director Angie Kim, a sophomore from Puyallup, Washington, first heard about the program as a freshman, when she attended the annual campus activities fair. "I got involved because I was interested in reaching out to children," says Kim. "I wanted to be a mentor."
The program's weekly activities are simple, and have included games like Red Light, Green Light (using the Korean words for those colors), and a Korean board game called The Game of Life. Once a term the organization collaborates with the Vietnamese student organization Tim Viet, which runs a similar program for Vietnamese adoptees.
Today, however, the kids are focused on learning about Teacher's Day, celebrated in Korea on May 15, and on fashioning colored paper into carnations. After finishing their flowers, the children look up expectantly at Hwang, who is leading the workshop. "Students give carnations to teachers to thank them," he says. "Can you think of a teacher you want to say thank you to?"
One child pipes up: "Yeah—you guys."
