Volunteering in a Korean Hospice: A Cross-Cultural Reflection

Introduction: From Korea to San Francisco

I am a 26-year-old male community college student living in San Francisco, California. I was born in Korea and lived there until I was 22. As an international student majoring in Health Sciences, I decided that moving to the United States and pursuing my educational and career goals would offer me a chance to expand my personal knowledge and gain greater insight into a different cultural experience. Certainly, this has been the case. Not only are customs completely different in the United States, but so are communication styles and social expectations. While San Francisco is a major city — and at times crowded — it is nothing like the wall-to-wall experience of densely packed urban life in Asia. Additionally, I knew from my studies that America is considered a great "melting pot," but I was never quite prepared for so many different ethnicities and diverse people to be living together in one city. This, and other differences in the cultural and social life of the city, caused me to reflect deeply on the events that have changed my life.

Before I moved to the United States, I was a general biology major at a college in Korea. I was also chairman of a volunteer group at the college called NANURI ("sharing love"). The group consisted of about 15 people, and we visited what is known in Korea as a Flower Village. These Flower Villages are actually long-term nursing care and hospice facilities, primarily serving the poor and homeless. Our group assisted nurses, read to clients, helped them with daily tasks, and supported the facility's operations.

Volunteering at a Korean Flower Village

As a hospice volunteer especially, I learned to respect the gift of life, and also to understand that life and living are cycles that must be honored — cycles in which, sometimes, people must move on to their next plane of existence. The volunteer experience allowed me to appreciate my own situation in life, to recognize that everyone has something to give and contribute to the world, and that the simple act of caring and sharing with others can empower and actualize oneself. Largely because of this experience, I changed my major and refocused my life on the study of nursing, with the eventual aim of dedicating my career to helping those less fortunate.

As I prepared for this assignment, the idea of service and volunteering began to weigh heavily on my mind, and I found myself comparing and contrasting attitudes toward service between Koreans and Americans. Clearly, the spirit of volunteerism is not dead in America. There are hundreds of agencies, the Peace Corps, civilian and religious groups, and school-based service projects that take on volunteer work of every kind. What is particularly interesting is that one might expect, during harder economic times, that the spirit of volunteering would lag — that people would turn inward and focus on their own problems. In fact, this does not appear to be the case.

Volunteerism in America vs. Korea

According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, volunteering in America has remained steady or even increased despite economic downturns, and those who volunteer are often among the people hit hardest by the economy. This tells me that there is a sense of compassion that transcends isolated personal difficulties and allows people to step outside their comfort zones to help others — thereby actually helping themselves in the process. This was certainly true for me. In the daily tasks of volunteering, I found myself and my center — my ability to look past the physical or intellectual aspects of a person and see them simply as a human being, with the same wants, needs, desires, and need for compassion, empathy, and emotional support.

I also began to examine my feelings about my own country and Korea's somewhat prejudicial attitude toward the "other." While it is acceptable and even encouraged for Koreans to volunteer to help fellow Koreans, there remains an attitude of separateness — a hierarchy of class rooted in economics and long-standing prejudice against other Asian countries, and especially against foreigners who visit Korea. I remember one American student telling us how offended she was when she attempted to donate blood to a Korean hospital: she was politely turned away, with the nurse explaining that the hospital had no need of her "type" of blood. Did this mean that because the student was American, her blood type would be significantly different from that of someone in Korea? Or did it suggest that giving of oneself through volunteering can only be performed within a particular socio-cultural group?