50년만에 한국으로부터 받은 보답

미국 뉴욕주(州)에 사는 샌드라 네이선씨는 은퇴한 인권·노동 변호사(retired civil rights and labor lawyer)다. 올해 75세인 그녀는 폭발적으로 늘어나는 코로나19 감염 숫자 때문에(owing to the exploding number of COVID-19 cases) 갈수록 고립감을 느끼고 있었다(feel increasingly isolated).

코로나 생존박스/샌드라 네이선 트위터

그런데 며칠 전 소포 하나를 받았다. 한국국제교류재단에서 보내온 것이었다. ‘코로나19 생존 박스(COVID-19 Survival Box)’라고 쓰여 있었다. ‘한국을 위한 귀하의 헌신에 감사 표시로(as a token of our gratitude for your dedication to Korea)’라는 메모와 함께 마스크 100장, 항균 장갑(antibacterial gloves), 홍삼 캔디(red ginseng candy), 은수저(silver chopsticks and spoons), 비단부채(silk fan), 피부 보호제(skin-care product) 등이 들어 있었다. 네이선씨는 뉴욕타임스 인터뷰에서 “마치 1968년부터 나를 향해 기나긴 여행을 해온 상자 같았다. 거기에 담긴 마법 같은 것이 나를 눈물짓게 했다(bring me to tears)”고 했다.

54년 전인 1966년, 시카고대학을 갓 졸업한 21세 때 한국에 가는 평화봉사단(Peace Corps)에 자원했다. 우여곡절 끝에(after many twists and turns) 춘천에서 여고생들 영어 가르치는 일을 하게 됐다. 당시 한국은 질병과 독재, 가난과 6·25전쟁 폐허 더미에 찌들어 있었다(be stricken by disease, dictatorship, poverty and ruins left by the Korean War).

아이들은 신발도 없이 돌아다녔다. 밤이면 쥐들이 천장을 뛰어다니는 소리를 들으며(hear rats running across ceilings) 밤잠을 설쳐야 했다(sleep fitfully). 뒷간엔 화장지도 없었다(be unavailable). 평화봉사단원들의 논쟁거리 중 하나는 타임지(誌)와 뉴스위크 중 어느 것을 찢어 닦는 것이 낫냐는 것이었다. 겨울에는 얼음을 깨고 세수를 해야 했고, 교실에는 작은 숯불 난로(charcoal stove) 하나뿐이어서 햇볕 드는 곳을 쫓아다니며 체온을 유지했다(maintain her body heat).

 

그런 환경에서도 학생들은 열심히 영어 공부를 하려 했고(be eager to learn English), 네이선은 그런 아이들에게 흠뻑 정이 들어갔다(grow very attached to them). 2년 동안 애틋한 사연이 많았지만, 이런 일도 있었다. 유난히 자주 아픈(be sickly) 아이가 있었다. 안 되겠다 싶어 미군 군의관에게 데려가 장내 기생충 치료(treatment for intestinal parasites)를 받게 했다.

 

엄마가 찾아왔다. 눈물을 글썽이며(with tears in her eyes) 뭔가를 내밀었다. 아직 온기가 남아있는 달걀 몇 개였다. 깃털이 붙어있었다. 정작 그 달걀을 먹고 기운 차려야 할 이는 그 모녀라는 생각에 눈물이 핑 돌았다(be close to tears).

 

그로부터 50여 년이 지난 며칠 전, 그 후손들에게서 소포를 받았다. 그 안에는 깃털 묻은 달걀 대신 네이선씨를 지켜주겠노라 보내온 코로나19 생존 물품들이 들어있었다. 눈물이 핑 돌았다고 했다.

 

[참조 영문자료 사이트]

☞ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/world/asia/korea-coronavirus-care-package-peace-corps.html

She Helped South Korea in Its Time of Need. In the Pandemic, It Repaid Her.

Decades ago, a young American woman served an impoverished South Korea as a Peace Corps volunteer. Now the country is an economic powerhouse, and it decided to send her a token of its gratitude. ​

Sandra Nathan teaching a class in South Korea in the late 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer.Credit...via Sandra Nathan

 

SEOUL, South Korea — Sandra Nathan spent 1966 to 1968 in a South Korean town as a young Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English to high school girls. Fifty-two years later, Ms. Nathan, now back in the United States, received a care package from South Korea that nearly brought her to tears.

Ms. Nathan, 75, had been feeling increasingly isolated at home in Stephentown, N.Y. Reports about the exploding number of Covid-19 cases in the United States had made her anxious about going outside, where experts warned of second and third waves of infection.

Then, early this month, she received a packaged labeled “Covid-19 Survival Box.” It was a gift from the South Korean government that contained ​100 ​masks and other items “as a token of our gratitude for your dedication to Korea.”

“It was as if this box had been traveling to me since 1968,” s​aid Ms. Nathan, a retired civil rights and labor lawyer. “​There was something magical about the box. Some people, Korean people, very far away wanted to make sure that I was OK; that I had what I needed to fight a bad disease. They behaved as though they cared and were responsible for me.”​

Decades ago, ​South Koreans felt similarly toward Ms. Nathan and 2,000 other Peace Corps volunteers. When the young Americans served as teachers and health care workers between 1966 and 1981, ​South Korea was a third-world country stricken by disease​​​, a dictatorship, poverty and destruction left by the Korean War.

South Korea is now one of the richest countries in the world, and its response to the coronavirus pandemic has been held up as an example for other nations, even as it deals with a small uptick in cases. In October, to pay back some of its debt, the government-run Korea Foundation said it was sending its Covid-19 Survival Box​es​ to 514 former Peace Corps volunteers.

“Thanks in no small part to the help received from the Peace Corps,” the Korea Foundation’s president, Lee Geun, said in a letter ​in the box​, “Korea has since achieved an economic breakthrough.”

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South Korea was a country stricken by disease and poverty in the time Ms. Nathan and other Peace Corps volunteers spent there.Credit...Kim Chon-Kil/Associated Press

Ms. Nathan joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Chicago. She was among the first volunteers to arrive in South Korea and was assigned to Chunchon, in the north, where she taught English at a local high school. She was 21.

The country around Chunchon was beautiful​. Its pine trees were graceful, and azaleas covered its hills in spring. ​But most of the streets were dirt roads. Children went outside without shoes. After dark, ​Ms. Nathan could hear rats running across ceilings. Plumbing was generally nonexistent.

“An ongoing debate among volunteers was whether Time or Newsweek was more absorbent,” Ms. Nathan said​ in an email interview. “Toilet paper was unavailable.”​

Both magazines came with pages blacked out by ​government censors. Crude anti-communist propaganda was everywhere. During her stay in South Korea, North Korea captured a U.S. Navy ship, the Pueblo, off its coast and sent armed commandos across the border to attack the South Korean presidential palace.

On winter mornings, Ms. Nathan broke the ice in a plastic container in order to wash. Her school was a sad and drafty place where classrooms were heated by a single charcoal stove.

​“I began to feel uncomfortably cold so that when I was not teaching, I regularly followed the circling sun as it flooded through the windows around the school building,” she said. “Even when it was very cold, students did not wear coats to school or to morning assemblies, and probably no one had a coat.”

But Ms. Nathan developed strong emotional ties with her students, who were eager to learn English. She once took a poor and sickly girl to an American military doctor for treatment for intestinal parasites, a common problem in Korea back then. The girl’s mother later arrived at the school and presented Ms. Nathan with several warm eggs, soft gray feathers still attached.

“The eggs, which I am sure my student and her mother themselves needed, expressed such gratitude that I was close to tears,” she said.

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