Our Hagwon Experience

As missionaries our first purpose is to invite others to come unto Christ. This is an important and meaningful assignment which we attempt to accomplish in a variety of ways. This is an assignment we first accepted upon baptism into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Saints. We each made a promise to stand as a witness and to strive to follow Him. We have attempted to honor this promise throughout our lives. It is not just a hat we wear, but part of everything we do. It's the way we live. Like many of our Christian brothers and sisters, it is who we are not just something we say. Even though we are often busy with the busy-ness of life, we try to stay centered through study, worship, obedience, and charity. Life during a full time mission is still life in this world. As a senior couple we have more flexibility and less demands than the young missionaries. Our mission life is closer to our "civilian" life than is theirs. Yet it is very much a time of our life which has been "set apart" to focus on serving our Lord by serving others. We invite many people into our home. We share simple messages of inspiration and hope. We try to provide fun and fellowship. We hope they feel His love for them as we show them kindness and concern. We invite them to learn more about our church. Then regardless of their answer we continue to demonstrate our love and concern. It's real and it's sincere. It is not conditional, just as His love is not conditional.

We also try very hard to follow Him, as we promised to do.  I say try because we often fall short, but we just keep trying. We bear his name on our missionary name tags, so we try to represent Him well. We hope to be the good neighbor, the kind stranger, the true friend! We seek opportunities to serve others and those opportunities are not hard to find.


One of our favorite forms of service is our volunteer work at a Korean 학원. 
This is a Hagwon, the name for a private institute, academy or cram school prevalent in South Korea. Here education is of utmost importance. The children have long school days followed by participation in after school educational programs provided through the Hagwon system. They receive help with their required school work and prepare for  participation in many other kinds of lessons.

Once a week we have the privilege of helping in a small library, a reading Hagwon. Our assignment is to help the students learn some conversational English. There are eight students between four and fifteen years of age. The kids are divided into  two classes. We partner with a set of young missionaries. I teach the younger kids and Fred teaches the older. We try to use games, pictures and even primary songs. The kids are smart and so very cute. We hope they will learn something during their time with us. We hope they will have a favorable impression of Americans and missionaries. We hope they feel they are loved and valued, by us and by Him!

December 20, 2014
NOTE: I want to update and clarify this post. During our time volunteering at the library we became close to the director- who uses the name Jennifer when speaking to Americans. She spoke minimal English, but the young missionaries often translated and we were able to learn much about her and the library. So for the sake of accuracy, I would like to correct some information in this post.  This library is not technically a Hagwan. They are private academies run as businesses and are often quite costly for the parents. The Korean government wanted to provide the advantage of additional education to less privileged children so they subsidized these little libraries. Jennifer started hers because she wanted her own children and others to develop a love of reading and to learn English. She did so without the approval of family and friends who thought she should focus on making money. Jennifer was able to attract more students and receive more subsidy because we are native English speakers and also each have a four year college degree. She constantly expressed her gratitude. Knowing those facts made our service more meaningful to us. It's been two months since we taught our last lesson there. I miss those sweet children and am so grateful for this choice opportunity.