January 17, 2024

Home and Labels

We have only been here for less than 3 weeks, but my room is already starting to become more of an extension of myself and less like the foreign hostel I felt I was intruding upon. Akin to my home in Seattle, I find that the consistency of this space provides a similar relief from the overwhelming energy of the dense and lively city outside. As I walked into the slums today, I found myself thinking more about what home means to different people. The community we visited today consisted of a majority who migrated hundreds of kilometers away from their native rural village. Every month or so they go back by bus to visit family, celebrate holidays and weddings, and find a break between the normal long working hours in the city. For the people in this slum, home is not only this self-constructed shelter of plywood and tarp, but also the village of generational friends and family they left behind. The ability to adapt and create an extension of oneself in a completely new environment is not only an achievement in itself, but to do so with such limited resources is something that many of us cannot even fathom. This is just another example of resilience as a part of human nature, something that we have been seeing to great extremes since we got here.

Although we are greeted with many mixed reactions, some warm and some cold, it is not our place to decide whether our presence is benefiting these people, but rather theirs. It is important to remember that we are just as much intruders as we are guests to some here. However, as we continue our stay, I begin to feel a sense of comfort in this space in parallel to my longing for where I came from. This feeling, while to a different extent, seems to be mutual for those in the slums (although their adaptation to life here is more out of necessity for a better future rather than voluntary educational ventures). What today illustrated was something I was worried about being labeled as, “an unwelcome guest”, but the more I sit with that the more I find myself accepting that our presence, despite our best intentions, can be perceived as negative. However this is not to dismiss our intentions, as our hope for creating something worth everyone’s time and efforts is the reason why we all came here I hope. In reality, people label us in just as many ways as we label them; whether they are bad or good is subjective, irrelevant, but equally vital to further understanding our place within this foreign land.

By Taekyung