시온영락교회 - SHORT UPDATE / PRAYER REQUESTS [석민애]

Hi everyone! I am in Ethiopia. My flight from Seoul to Addis Ababa (where I had a layover) got delayed, so I missed my connecting flight to Accra and now I'm here for the night at a hotel before taking my flight tomorrow morning. Grateful, because I've had a chance to rest on a BED (for the first time in 5 days) and some time to reflect on my transit so far. AND wifi access!! Probably wont have this for a while so.. just wanted to update you.

모두 안녕하세요. 저는 지금 이디오피아에 있어요. 서울에서 아디스아바바행 비행기가 늦게 출발하고 연착이 되어서, 가나 아크라로 향하는 연결편 비행기를 놓쳤어요. 그래저 지금 저는 내일 아침 아크라행 비행기를 탈 때까지 여기에세서 호텔에서 하루 숙박을 하고 있어요. 감사한 것은 지난 닷새 만에 처음으로 침대에서 쉴 수 있는 기회를 갖게 된 것이고, 지금까지의 여행을 되돌아 볼 수 있는 여유를 각제 된 것이죠. 거기다가 인터넷 연결까지!!! 당분간 인터넷 사용이 쉽지 않을 것이기 때문에, 잠간 소식을 전하고 싶었어요....

I have some specific prayer requests: 몇가지 구체적인 기도제목이 있습니다.
- That I am sensitive to how God is moving and that I FOLLOW/OBEY. Because there are times to be cautious and times to be bold, times to be wise and times to be stupid, right? It all depends really. But it depends on the Lord Almighty who leads me, and I want to make sure that I'm listening and following correctly.

제가 하나님의 행하심에 민감할 수 있게 하셔서, 잘 따르고 순종할 수 있도록 기도해 주세요. 왜냐하면 조심스러워야 할 때가 있고 담대해야 할 때가 있을 것이며, 지혜로와야 할 때가 있고 어리석어야 할 때가 있을 것일 테니까요. 그렇죠? 정말 상황에 따라 다 다르죠. 그러나 이 모든 것은 저를 이끄시는 전능하신 하나님께 달려 있고 그래서, 저는 제가 좀 더 확실하게 하나님의 음성을 제대로 듣고 있고 따르고 싶어요.

- That I have an open heart and REALLY seek to engage with the community openly. I'm going to be there for 8 weeks... that's long enough for me to really be a part of the community (okay not REALLY, but almost really) and I want to take the opportunity to do that.

제가 진정으로 열린 마음을 가질 수 있도록, 그리고 열린 마음으로 그 지역 사람들과 어울리기를 추구할 수 있도록 기도해 주세요. 저는 8주간 동안 그곳에 머물 예정이고, 그 기간은 진짜로 그 공동체의 일부가 될 수 있을 만큼 충분히 긴 시간이라고 생각되요.(진짜로 라고 하기에는 좀 그렇고, 거의 진짜로) 그리고, 저는 그렇게 되는 기회를 놓치지 않고 싶어요.

- Good conversations; that the gospel is preached in my every word and deed.

좋은 의사소통을 위해서 기도해 주세요.

복음이 저의 모든 말과 행동을 통해서 선포될 수 있도록 기도해 주세요.

- Health/safety. Didn't get to take my malaria medicine because I packed it... woops.

건강과 안전을 위해서 기도해 주세요. 말라리아 약을 수화물로 붙여 버려서 제 때 약을 먹지 못했네요^^

THANK YOU! ♥ 감사합니다.

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GOING (reasons)

Thought I’d just go right ahead being reflective and stuff, hahaha. So I’ll take a couple minutes to talk about why I’m going to Ghana with WPE this summer. It’s a long-winded story, and this is maybe the second time I’ve tried to articulate it to myself, so please be patient with me.

12F, I took a class in the engineering department that changed my life: Design Thinking. I’m not an engineer—far from it. In my 15-department exploration of Dartmouth College, I stayed away from anything that looked or smelled (heh) like Engineering: Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science… Why? I’m a big-picture person; I naturally look at things structurally, finding patterns. My expertise lies in taking massive amounts of information and consolidating them into structured points. Sound like the perfect government major, right? (That’s me. Hee.) I couldn’t possibly see how Engineering and I could have anything in common. But Design Thinking helped me to unpack some of my misconceptions about Engineering, and gave me a taste of how my skill set could be utilized to do things that really make me feel alive.

It’s hard to explain Human-Centered Design Thinking to those who have not encountered it before, but I’ll give it a shot. It’s a principle developed by designers in Palo Alto that says that design should not be primarily about the aesthetics, but rather about the user experience. It places human experiences and empathy of those human experiences at the core of every decision-making process involved in the design and manufacture of products and services. That seems simple enough, except—how do we place human experiences at the center? How do we know what people need? A large part of design thinking is about listening and observing human experiences; these observations are then abstracted into patterns that help us identify an essential need; and the final part is the ideation/creation/prototyping of solutions to meet the identified need.

In Design Thinking, we explored each of these phases, learning and applying the attitude and skills necessary for each distinct aspect. At the end of the course, we plunged into three final projects that took us through the whole process of listening, abstracting, and creating. I was completely captivated, wholly engaged. Ask any of my roommates from 12F, and they would tell you that I lived and breathed each of my projects, thinking about needs and solutions even while I ate and slept.

What I found by the end of the course was that Human-Centered Design is essentially about managing complexity—it’s about gathering massive amounts of data and sifting/organizing/structuring to identify needs, generate creative ideas, and implement tangible solutions. And at the center of all this gathering, sifting, and organizing of data is a REAL HUMAN PROBLEM that can improve lives. This was what I have in common with engineering—that engineering strives to solve real problems, and that tackling real problems is what makes me feel alive. Engineers need designers, who are simply strategists that manage chaos into a structured game plan. And this happens to be my exact expertise.

The TL;DR of it all is this: I like managing complexity and structuring chaos. But I didn’t realize that I could love doing it—to the point that it consumed me day and night—until I applied it to projects with tangible outcomes, centered around real people and real needs.

So why Ghana? Hahahaha.

This was a real round-about way of getting here, but I wanted to articulate the experiences that have solidified my understanding of who I am and who I want to be, before explaining what I am doing now. So in addition to Human-Centered Design, I’ll share two more factors that have shaped and will continue to shape my trajectory.

The first of the two is International Development. In all honesty, international development isn’t something that I have thought about or studied in great depth, although I have been meaning to, all throughout Dartmouth. Freshman spring, I took a course called Intro to International Development with Colleen Fox in the Geography department—and I remember thinking that this was the only meaningful class I had taken all year. There is injustice in the world, and there are layers of problems associated with it, particularly in the context of international development. I became a Government major with the full intention of exploring the Government/IR layer of developmental issues. But partly due to the government department’s limitations and partly due to my lack of initiative, I haven’t been able to make good on that promise. But development is definitely an interest that have been shaping the decisions that I make, and I will educate myself more to be an active participant in developmental initiatives.

The second factor is Education. Ah. I’ve been stuck at this paragraph for a little while now. I don’t know exactly how to convey the emotional place that the issue of education has in my heart. I believe in education; I believe in good education. I believe that relationships are at the foundation of education. I believe in all children feeling loved and secure enough to fail and learn from those failures. I believe in all children feeling empowered. I believe in all children learning to love themselves. All of this comes from a place of having been educated by the best during the most formative years of my life: my parents. It also comes from having felt secure and loved by my third grade teacher at one of the most insecure points of my life: my immigration to the States. And finally this comes from having loved a great number of my own students, who have grown immeasurably and shown me that relational education is worthwhile and necessary. Anyways, education. It has been a continuing thread in my life, and I want to continue living a life that advocates good education for all children.

Whew. So having explained the three key factors that play into who I am and who I’d like to become, ‘Why Are You Going’ becomes a much simpler question. As you might surmise, I want to pursue a career at the intersection of: (design/innovation) strategy, international development, and education. And I have no idea what that looks like. But what I do know is that all human-centered design solutions are derived from one principle—empathy. Empathy is about engaging with the community, conversing with them, experiencing what they experience, seeing things from their point of view. Empathy is feeling with somebody. And whatever I end up doing, if I want to address real human problems, I’m going to have to start with empathy.

So to keep the answer short (after long ramblings), the reason I’m going is because of empathy. But not specifically and exclusively to Ghana. That’s why this blog isn’t titled ‘ghana minae’ or anything specific to Ghana. I am going, wherever I go, for empathy. I want to see a lot of the world, and I want to see a world wherever I go. Does that make sense? And Ghana just happens to be my first destination. (I plan on having many more, despite the pain that is transit). In my goings, these are the things that I want and expect:

I want/expect to fully engage with the community
I want/expect to be observant about habits/patterns/difficulties/joys/values
I want/expect to hold meaningful conversations with everyone I meet
I want/expect to push myself outside of my comfort zones
I want/expect to be thoughtful and self-reflective of my natural responses to new experiences
I want/expect to see more clearly the ways that I want to live my life

Pretty simple, right? But I don’t want to pretend that this blog will be anything more than a pursuit of recording what I see and think about. Just wanted to give you some context for why I’m going in the first place, and what I hope from my travels.

Thank you for reading this insanely long blog post!

4:19 pm • 29 June 2013

"알고 누리고 나누는, 주님의 소원"

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SHORT UPDATE / PRAYER REQUESTS [석민애]

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