Education: Meeting Where We Are
Space ZARI For Community Exchange
By Ana Traynin
On a Monday evening in January, on a dark and quiet street in Dongmyeong-dong across from Daein Market, you approach a jutaek house with painted windows and a light on in the first floor. As you walk in through the unlocked glass door, you are greeted by a friendly brown poodle in a striped winter shirt. There is a kitchen, bookshelves, decorations, a worktable and a table with couches for meetings.
Kim Jong Pil, an environmental activist in his forties, and 30-year-old Namgu Youth Center worker Park Jeong Hwa have come from other neighborhoods for a Japanese lesson. This is not a café or a study center. This is Space ZARI, a new house created by youth leader and group facilitator Lee Jong Hwa and teacher Um Hee Sun, a couple in their thirties who strive to share the place they live with the Gwangju community. ZARI especially aims to facilitate language and cultural exchange, hold group meetings, and give city youth a place to meet. Zari is a Korean word with various meanings. Um explains it as “here, space, where we live, meeting where we are.”
Lee grew up in Gwangju and worked two years at an alternative school in Seoul in 2007, when there were no such places in Gwangju. During his second stay in Seoul for graduate studies in education, Lee met Jinan native Um who studied English and Japanese, lived abroad and was then working at an NGO. Sharing a common dream for building community, they moved back down to Gwangju in early 2014 and began hatching their vision for an open living space.
They settled on a two-floor house with a big roof and set about converting the first floor former shop, building a rooftop garden and installing solar panels. With a guesthouse on the 2nd floor and a café atmosphere on the 1st floor, the house has already attracted Koreans from other cities and guests from the Netherlands, Denmark and France.
“We want to get married,” Lee says. “How can we be happy? What kind of life do we want to have? We are against the idea of a ‘closed’ living place. We want to show others how we live.”
Unlike some other community spaces, ZARI does not aim to be a business project or receive any government funding.
“We just do as much as we can do,” Lee says. “There are many projects and possibilities but this space is for Lee Jong Hwa and Um Hee Sun together with neighborhood people who need a place, especially youth.”
At the end of the school year, ZARI held a class party for Um’s younger alternative school students of Japanese. Most recently, the couple joined a Dong-gu village radio program. As a trilingual speaker, Um also hopes to use ZARI as a bridge between Gwangju locals and international residents.
“Some Koreans want to learn a language and I can bring them together to meet people from other countries in a fun and comfortable atmosphere, sharing culture, language and cooking.”
Um’s Japanese skills are already helping her adult students to achieve their communication goals.
“I do environmental activism, especially related to Japan,” Kim Jong Pil said. “Each time I have met Japanese environmental activists, I wanted to have conversations, but I couldn’t. So I needed to learn.”
Park Jeong Hwa wants to be able to communicate while travelling in Japan.
“I am simply learning Japanese on my own because I want to travel to Japan. Learning like this is good.”
Kim explained that besides cafes, there are not many study spaces for university students in Gwangju. As a youth leader, Park commented that students lack money and after-school places to play outside of PC and singing rooms. ZARI is a place that could fulfill both needs.
While inviting friends from around the city, Lee and Um hope that their neighborhood residents could also make use of the space.
“It would be nice if we could be a resource for our neighbors in Dongmyeong-dong and not only people coming from other areas,” Lee said.
After their upcoming wedding, Lee and Um will live in the Space ZARI house full-time, welcoming Koreans and internationals to work and play together. To find out more and contribute to the project, find them on Facebook at 공간ZARI.