Q1. Please briefly introduce yourself!
Hello!! I am Kwon Na-hyeon, a volunteer who has joined MAP for the second half of 2022 🙂 I am currently studying sociology in graduate school!
Q2. Please fill in the blank in ‘I want to be a 000 volunteer’!
‘I want to be an open volunteer’
Back when I paid little attention to socially vulnerable people such as refugees, I think I believed that I was a person without prejudice. But as I have come to know these people more deeply and become involved in related work, I am realizing that I hold prejudices I had never imagined. So I hope that through this work I can have a more and more open mind. I want to be a volunteer without prejudice, who focuses only on each person’s life and experiences and loves everyone regardless of any other conditions.
Q7. When in your life did you feel excluded?
Until recently I spent about eight years in places other than Korea. When you live abroad, even if you have a home there, and friends and colleagues, you still realize from time to time that you are a stranger. Even while happily spending time with people whose mother tongue or skin color differs from mine, there are moments when I suddenly feel left out. Perhaps because of such experiences, I wanted all the more to work at MAP. The scholar Carens is said to have written, “Most human beings are deeply attached to the place they come from. So if they decide to leave it, it is often because their present lives are in great difficulty.” I want to be with refugees, who have made a difficult and unavoidable choice, as someone who knows that feeling of exclusion at least a little, so that they can feel less excluded in Korean society than they do now.
Q11. What gives you your own small but certain happiness?
Tteokbokki! Whatever the kind and whoever makes it, tteokbokki always seems to be a sure source of happiness. When I get through something hard, or want to celebrate something good, I always eat tteokbokki. It is a very small thing, but it is a sure way to be happy all day long 😀
Q12. Finally, what kind of ‘change’ do you want to bring about through your work at MAP?
Honestly, I do not expect my small efforts to bring about any dramatic change right away. But I believe that if the efforts of many other people who work with the same goal and awareness of the problem keep piling up on top of the small work I do, someday a society will come in which everyone, including refugees, lives together without being excluded. And for that someday, I want to do my best at the work I have been given.