Day 56: Hey everyone, hope you all had a good week! We wanted to share some photos with you from our school's field trip this Friday. From what we were told, we were going to a bug museum, and that was all the information we really got. Our instructions were, "make sure no one pees their pants and do not lose any of your kids!" So when the bus pulled onto a dirt road in the country, we didn't exactly know what to expect. After piling out of the buses and watching a very short video on insects, we then proceeded to a small little box filled with dirt and over sized beetle grubs (which our friend Patrick and our director Grace are holding in the photo below).
Each of the kids had to dig through the dirt to find a grub to take home with them in a jar (which we're sure their parents were super happy about, lol). At least the kids liked their grubs!
Above: Henry and Eric Middle: John, Louis and Daniel Bottom: Stella and Lina
Everything up to that point seemed to make sense seeing as we were there to supposedly teach the kids about bugs. However, we were then taken over to a small fenced off area where the kids were put into small groups. The "bug museum" owner then brought over two rabbits and put them in the fenced off area and told the first group of kids to go and chase the rabbits, and whoever caught a rabbit could bring it home. What seemed to be a fairly harmless activity turned into a fairly traumatic thing to watch. These poor rabbits were being attacked by groups of 20 young, wild children at a time, desperately trying to avoid being trampled. So then, once the rabbit (or both rabbits) were caught, the man threw them into the large orange sacks pictured below.
This may not sounds as inhumane as it really was. Maybe you had to be there to watch it, but it was total animal cruelty. To get an idea of how horrible it was, after all the classes had their turn tormenting the rabbits, the ones that were caught were dumped out of the bag (with no care at all) into a box for us to take back to the school. A few of the teacher's went over to the box and pointed out that one of the bunnies wasn't really moving. The man came over, pulled it out, told us it had a broken leg (probably from being thrown around so much) and quickly threw a new one into the box as a replacement. So clearly, animal rights are not as important in Korea as they are in Canada! So after a long day in the sun, and having learnt next to nothing about insects, it was time to go. Even though it wasn't quite the learning experience that we expected, the kids seemed to enjoy themselves, which at the end of the day is all that matters.The rest of the weekend was pretty relaxed. Two of the teachers we work with are leaving at the end of this week, so we all went out for a big dinner, bowling and some Noribong (karoake) on Saturday night. Besides that, we did a little shopping, and a little cleaning and saw Brothers Bloom this afternoon. We hope you guys got some good weather for the weekend :) Happy Father's Day dads!
With love from South Korea,
Shayna & Brandon
