The Marmot’s Hole

TomCoyner

Coyner’s Comment: The following is from a Peace Corps Volunteer from the 60’s or 80’s in Korea who has made a bona fide career as a professional international aid worker since then. The following is a professional, if somewhat personally biased, perspective on the Saemmul Presbyterian Church folly in Afghanistan:

CHURCH TOURISTS

After being in the development/aid industry for a couple of decades I think I have a fairly good handle on how the system works. Since I started in this industry I have worked in Indochina during the exodus of boat people and subsequent refugee camps, in South Asia after the tsunami, in Kosovo after the war, in Africa after a famine, in Cambodia after the genocide. In all cases the aid was predictable; the donors descended and dumped money on the known and proven players who took the money and started working to address the needs. The individuals who are on the ground doing the work in such cases are known. They have been to other hot spots doing the same thing. They know each other because it is a small community and a tight profession. In all cases the donors and players were multinational – the US is almost always the biggest spender and biggest implementer, but the Japanese, Australians, British, New Zealanders, Norwegians, and Canadians were there. So were the Dutch. So were the Germans. The Koreans were not.

The Koreans have never been involved in relief and development. It was only very reluctantly that the Koreans had anything to do with the Indochinese refugees during the 80s. When a Korean flag vessel picked up refugees on the high seas (i.e. Vietnamese) they were allowed a free ride to South Korea. Then it got interesting. Few people remember that there was a refugee camp in Pusan where Vietnamese boat people sat behind barbed wire for years. When, in about 1991, South Korea established diplomatic ties with Vietnam, that barbed wire camp was quietly emptied and razed in the lead up to the official normalization. To my knowledge, that was the most direct involvement Korea has had in aid and development in the past three decades. Otherwise the Koreans have had a different agenda and have been busy doing other things.

So it strikes me as ludicrous that a church group from the suburbs has the audacity to gather up a bunch of young women and throw them to the wolves wearing matching ball caps and T-shirts. This is not aid. This is not development. This is church-based tourism gone horribly wrong. If the Koreans call it anything else, then they are liars or have been mislead.

Afghanistan is an active war zone. Aid organizations are very careful in who they send in to Afghanistan because the stress levels and working conditions are extreme. I know of several organizations that, even now, maintain a strict policy of forcing development workers to get on a plane and get out of there every 5th or 6th week for R&R. They have professional counselors assigned to the staff. They have bodyguards. They work in walled compounds with razor wire on the top of the wall. They can’t fraternize with the locals because they can’t get out of the compound. The level of frustration among the professionals is high because they often feel that their hands are tied and they can accomplish very very little in Afghanistan. A colleague worked there for 18 months recently and he was responsible for revitalizing an irrigation system that would provide water to 600 farmers across a huge swath of the country. In 18 months he was prohibited from visiting the actual work on the ground – he had to sit in a walled compound and manage the work through other people without ever having seen the actual canals and ditches and pumps. He looked at digital photos of the work – that’s all he saw.

Another colleague took a position there after dreaming of work in Afghanistan for more than a decade. His one ambition was to find a way to get there. When, sitting in my office, I told him that he had an offer to go he broke down and wept with unexpected joy. Six weeks after getting to the place that had been his professional dream he packed up and left. He was unwilling to live in such a dangerous environment with a young wife and new child back home.

Afghanistan has lost the focus of the media because of Iraq, but it is still there and the bullets are still flying. In fact, the invasion force is losing ground and the Taliban is building strength. Things are not going well. The outlook is bad. The stability that was there 18 months ago is gone. Many aid organizations have packed up and pulled out to wait until it is safer to return.

It is into this environment that the Korean church is sending their tour groups. They are not development workers. They are not medical missionaries. They are short term tourists in matching ball caps and T shirts who stay huddled together in a pack and screech Korean at each other and eat ramyon from their suitcase and take photos on their mobile phones as they ham it up by holding up the “Korea-is-two” sign and grinning at the camera. These are kids. These are mono-linguistic tourists who would be a lot better off staying clear of the world’s danger zones and out of the paths of bullets. The combination of arrogance and ignorance shown by the leaders of that suburban church is astounding. Their group has no credentials that would justify their presence in Afghanistan. Their church has no track record in the development industry – nobody in Korea has a track record in the development industry.

Now one of the church tourists is dead. The authorities of that church must be held responsible for this completely avoidable killing. There was absolutely no reason for those tourists to be in a war zone and the decision to go there displays a complete and total lack of understanding of world affairs, regional tensions, or how aid is delivered in such locations. The claim that some of the church tourists had mastered local dialects is laughable. Knowing how Koreans measure their mastery of English, I’m sure their mastery of local Afghan dialects must be equally as flimsy.

The Koreans should leave the aid and development to the professionals and send their church tourism groups to more hospitable and receptive venues such as Cheju-do or Sorak-san. Inevitably they will treat the murdered tourist as a martyr for the faith when, in fact, they ought to focus on the church leaders and recognize that they are accomplices in the murder.

[Footnote: Now that I have learned that the ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs tried to block the church tourists, and the tourists countered by threatening to sue the government, I am even more livid. Those idiots need to be jailed.]

TomCoyner

Given some of the comments regarding my posting of a letter entitled “Church Tourists” - comment #59, I have contacted my friend who originally received the posted letter for some details on the author.

I might first clarify that the letter’s author was not in the Peace Corps, in Korea or anywhere else. (Sorry about that erroneous introduction.) And he is most definitely NOT a missionary.

His academic background is in development and aid, and except for a few years spent in Korea in the 1990s, he has worked for NGOs in that field in several Asian locations as well as in Kosovo (as he describes).

He is currently working for a New England-based NGO in development in South Asia, but not Afghanistan; I’m not aware that he has visited Afghanistan.

His comments on the Korean character are based on first-hand experience — not only here on the peninsula, but also on numerous encounters in other countries, with Koreans from both sides of the DMZ.

(I might add that he is not at all fond of what Korean entrepreneurs and the tourists they bring in have done to Siem Reap, Cambodia.)

To the best of my knowledge, he does not follow Marmot’s Hole or other Korea blogs. He comes up with his own thoughts.

I hope this helps clarify who is this person and from where he is coming.

For what it may be worth…