WEMAP: Meet MAP’s volunteers for the first half of 2024 🙂 Meet Kwon Yun-su, the volunteer who has joined “Dialogue with Refugees”🥰
Q1. Please give a brief introduction of yourself!
Hello. I am Kwon Yun-su, and I have joined MAP as a volunteer for the first half of 2024. I am in charge of the “Dialogue with Refugees” project, which we run together with refugee speakers. By carrying the speakers’ life stories to every corner of our society, I want to create spaces for conversation that more people can “empathize” with.
Q2. Please share why you applied to MAP 🙂
Last year I had the chance to hear a lecture by members of a migrant workers’ union at my school’s public interest law center. According to what refugee speakers told us directly, the reality for refugees and migrant workers in Korea was a series of discriminatory systems, from the entry procedures at the airport to the working conditions after being granted permission to stay. The stories of these victims of social and legal discrimination are treated entirely as the stories of “others”, fall outside our society’s attention, and are increasingly concealed and tolerated. Through MAP’s activities such as “Dialogue with Refugees”, I want to help bring the stories of many different refugees to wider light in our society.
Q3.Please fill in the blank: “I want to be a ___ activist”
I want to be a persistent volunteer. The purpose of the project to improve perceptions of refugees is to remove prejudice against refugees and instill a correct understanding of them. But overturning prejudice that has already settled in someone’s mind cannot happen overnight, so I think steady effort must go into it.
Q4. What change do you want to bring about through your work at MAP?
I hope for a society in which refugees and the native-born alike see each other as equal “members of society” and respect one another. It may be a long and distant task, but since many migrants already live alongside us in our society, I think it is the change we need most.