❤️ Volunteering in Seoul 🤗💌

Whilst studying abroad in Seoul, traveling around and experiencing new places are all exciting and fun for sure! Immersing yourself in Korean culture can also include hands-on experiences, such as engaging with community service, volunteering, and giving back to the community. Fortunately, CIEE encourages community service and volunteering through its programs, and especially CIEE Seoul, which happens to facilitate volunteering experiences persistently. In this article, I will share my different community engagement activities I have given the opportunity to participate in and the lessons I learned from them.

• Teaching English to middle-school Kids 👩🏻‍🏫📚

We volunteered at the nearby Family Center to teach English to kids around the age of 9-12. After being given an orientation meeting, we got to know each other and teamed up with another student from the CIEE program to prepare a lesson. Even students with no prior experience can join the volunteer opportunity. The session lasts only about an hour, and it is a convenient location to get to. The first meeting can be nervous and exciting, but still, the kids just brighten up my day all the time. Whenever I feel stressed or overwhelmed, just seeing and interacting with the kids makes me grounded and pushes every bad feeling away. I highly recommend this volunteer activity if you enjoy working with kids and are willing to not only teach but also learn from the kids 🥰.

• Mask Up-cycling/Re-cycling 😷♻️

Honestly, I was so confused and a little bit disgusted by the activity when I heard about it at first. Then, I got to know it was not used masks but expired new masks which we would recycle. Koreans are hygienic and use masks very frequently, which means there are a lot of masks being produced and distributed in Korea. However, not all masks get to be used and expire without being used or sold. Therefore, there are tons of expired unused masks becoming a waste that is not even recycled properly due to their different parts containing different elements, which should be recycled separately. We had two sessions, each lasting an hour, to separate 3 different parts of masks. Although it was not a drastic volunteering event, I learned a lot from the session. With the mask parts we separated, they upcycle the parts to toothpaste squeezers, cute keychains, and even socks 🧦! ♼

Besides these activities, CIEE Seoul also has various volunteering opportunities, such as Teaching English to seniors and Audio-recording of books for visually impaired children. I am so grateful for these opportunities, and I hope you will also enjoy volunteering and giving back to the community while studying abroad here in Seoul! ❤️🌐