I’m Thankful for…

Growing up, I’m not sure we went around the table and said what we were thankful for on Thanksgiving. From what I remember it was something I saw in movies or in tv shows, and it wasn’t until I came to Korea that I started doing it (my family may say otherwise). I started it mainly because my non-American friends (the majority) would ask if we were going to do it, and since it was their first Thanksgiving (at the time) I couldn’t give them an inauthentic experience based on how they perceived we celebrated it. However, as I’ve gotten older, I feel as if there are more things in my life to be thankful for, and while I continually try to keep these in mind, sharing them out loud forces you to acknowledge them.

This year I’m thankful that I was in Korea during the pandemic. The last year and a half I haven’t been happy living in Korea, most of my friends left (only two of them are around and they live between a half hour and an hour away), I’ve been depressed at times and extremely lonely. Korea is a difficult place to live, it’s even harder living in a rural area. However, Korea was and is probably one of the best countries to be in during these times. From the onset they handled the pandemic with efficiency, and because of this they didn’t need to implement lockdowns or severe restrictions on daily activities. In addition, all of my schools have below 60 students, so I have been teaching in person since June. This is definitely the primary reason why I feel it has impacted me less, other teachers here have been teaching online or a mixture of both. Added to this is that I didn’t lose my job and the communication from the Office of Education had been great. I’m still part of the ESL Spanish facebook group and watched as teachers commented and posted with no idea what was going to happen to their jobs and whether or not they were going to get paid. I know unemployment around the world has reached record heights, so I’m grateful that I still have a job and that I have been able to earn money.

Lastly, being in Korea has allowed me to focus on what needed to be done for my future. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if it were not for the hours of “desk-warning” (coming into school even though there were no classes because of Covid between March-May) I may not have decided to go to graduate school for Architecture. I also wouldn’t have been able to study the amount of hours for the GRE, or the months I spent writing and editing each University’s essays. Focusing on my applications provided me with an objective and a distraction from my loneliness. If I weren’t in Korea, I may not have been able to devote the amount of hours I did into everything.

With the way Korea handled the pandemic and with what I needed to do, it was the perfect place for me to be.

Note: I am of course thankful that my family is healthy and that they have been able to continue to work, and I am fortunate that I haven’t lost anyone to Covid. There’s a lot of other things I am thankful for as well, but I wanted to focus on this one.