On My Way To Korea

No, I’m not one of the Americans quarantined in Korea (heck, I still haven’t gone!).  You can read the blog one of them is keeping over here.  But, I would like to share my experience being quarantined.

When I was still a member of the LDS church (see this post), I served a full-time mission for two years in Canada which is how I originally learned my Korean.  There are around 30-50,000 missionaries world-wide making it the largest official missionary program in the world.  You’ve probably seen the two people walking down the street with name tags, that was us.  Before going out into the field, one has to go through a Missionary Training Center (MTC) in order to learn how to teach about church and a second language if one is going to a foreign country.  The English-speaking missionaries only had to be in the MTC two weeks, while us Korean-speaking missionaries had to endure twelve weeks of non-stop studying and eating.

Every six weeks or so a new batch of Korean missionaries-to-be comes in.  Well, apparently one of the missionaries in the group under me came in with symptoms of the whooping cough and even tested positive.  As you can imagine, they quarantined all of the Korean-speaking missionaries so it wouldn’t spread to the rest of the MTC.  Luckily no one else got it and he was quickly treated and it didn’t become severe.  He was literally quarantined to his bedroom so he couldn’t even come out.  Shown below is his room (I thought it would be funny to smile and give a thumbs up for some reason…).  We were quarantined in half the floor of our dorm so we could at least visit each other.  Food had to be brought to us and everything for about three days for us and five or six for him.

As you can imagine, it was exchausing being couped up with no where to go.  Well, put a bunch of guys with no where to go together and you get some interesting things.  What did we do for fun?

My heart goes out to those quarantined in Korea, I felt your pain =).