WEMAP: Introducing a MAP volunteer for the first half of 2024 🙂 Meet Park Jae-yeong, who joined the “Project to Improve Refugees’ Access to Information” 🥰
Q1. Please introduce yourself briefly.
Hello. I am Park Jae-yeong, a MAP volunteer for the first half of 2024. A few years ago I began learning Spanish out of simple curiosity, and this naturally led me to take an interest in the refugee issue between Latin America and the US border. While I was learning Spanish in Poland, I happened to have the chance to meet Ukrainian refugees. The more we talked, the more deeply I empathized with their economic and psychological difficulties, and the more seriously I came to see the problem. Since then I have set a new goal of becoming a human rights lawyer who can offer legal help to refugees, and I am moving toward that dream one step at a time.
Currently I am on MAP’s support team for the project to improve refugees’ access to information. My work is to research systems and policies that are useful to refugees living in Korea, and to produce and distribute them as card news. Because most of the news has a large direct or indirect effect on refugees’ lives, I feel a heavy sense of responsibility every time I publish an item, and I do my best to convey the content in a way that is easier and clearer.
Q2. Please share your motivation for applying to MAP. 🙂
While looking for volunteer work for refugees living in Korea, I came to know of an organization called MAP. What attracted me most was that it works in many areas to improve the quality of their lives. What impressed me most was that MAP looks not only at the economic, legal, and administrative difficulties refugees face in Korean society, but also at their inner difficulties through mental health and psychosocial support.
The direction of refugee support that MAP pursues gave me hope that it could realize “migration of the heart” (마음의 이주), which is what I dream of as true migration. I applied in order to become a volunteer who can help in that process.
Q3. Please fill in the blank: “I want to be an activist who is 000.”
I want to be a volunteer who is not ashamed of myself. I think everyone sometimes wants to compromise with themselves or with their circumstances and choose an easier way. When I am tired and worn out, I also think that this much might be enough. But rather than avoid the problem and quit because the moment is hard, I want to be a volunteer who, so as not to be ashamed of myself, honestly tells my fellow MAP volunteers and the refugees that it is hard, and who solves problems well together with them.
Q4. What do you think our society needs most right now in order to become a better society?
I think the thing our society needs most in order to become a better society is “dialogue.” With the popularity of MBTI, ways of understanding ourselves and others have become common, but we still seem to lack ways of accepting differences from other people and communicating with them. I wonder whether we feel a great burden even in starting a conversation with someone who holds a different opinion.
Behind recent social issues lies the problem that people do not even try to talk to each other because their views differ, or that one side refuses, so that society as a whole bears the pain. A world in which dialogue, the first step of communication, has declined makes all of us pay an enormous social cost and worsens the situation. Therefore, to become a better society, I believe we must move toward a society that starts with dialogue, resolves problems through dialogue, and develops through dialogue.
Q5. What gives you a small but certain happiness of your own?
Drinking a delicious iced Americano
Q6. When do you feel most like yourself?
When I confidently put forward my opinions or claims without worrying about those around me
Q7. There are times when, whether or not others notice, you think you look cool. When was the coolest moment in your life?
When I was elected student council president in high school
Q8. Is there something you have never done but would like to try in order to discover yourself?
Acting and DJing
Q9. What change do you want to bring about through your activities at MAP?
I want to create an atmosphere in which refugees feel more trust in MAP and gain confidence through MAP. I hope that, at least when they are with MAP, they feel they have met a reliable ally rather than loneliness. I am still a volunteer with little experience, but in that process I too will work together with refugees, build my expertise, and grow so that I can become a more dependable ally.