Staff Retreat in Geongju

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We left for Gyeongju on Friday afternoon (we had an early dismissal of school that day). The whole staff went; not just teaching staff but dorm staff, kitchen staff, cleaning staff, and Korean admin staff. It is a time to build community between the different parts of our school. The school foots the bill for everyone to stay at a really nice hotel for the weekend, eating these massive buffet dinners and even getting some cultural experiences (I’ll talk about those later). Our speaker for the weekend was a guy named Ben Torrie (which I thought was pretty funny, eh Freemans?). He comes from a long line of American missionaries in Korea and China. He spoke on building community (and did this well), but what I found most interesting was his current mission in Korea. He shared a lot about the conditions of the people living in North Korea, and my heart breaks for them. There is incredible poverty there, and people are being detained and killed for no reason at all. Their dictator has shut the outside world out, and their standard of living keeps dropping. He is working on something called “The Fourth River Project” which is a group of people (mostly Korean) who have come together to learn about North Korea and help plan so when the borders to North Korea open someday, they will have a resource of labourers and missionaries who can help to rebuild their country and care for their people. He spoke very passionately, and I was very moved by what he had to say.
We also had some great worship times together - there are some very talented musicians on staff. After the speaker, they pulled out the nori-bon machine (like Kareoke), and people sang into the night. I had a chance to get to know some more of the staff a bit better, and went to be too late!

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