(i typed this about a week ago. i've been busy. my lady left korea, i've been working wayyyyy too much, and trying to ninjafy my musculature as much as possible... therefore blogging has taken a back seat. as well, my computer bagged out completely. i lost everything. thank god for ipods, i was able to upload all 20 GB of my music back on. i had burned most of my photos.)

we did this thing this weekend. well, over the past month or so. there was this bigass earthquake in pakistan. the death toll has been huge. peoples' houses, families and lives are destroyed. we got all the kids in our school to bring in warm clothes, blankets and items that could help with a himalayan winter. we were able to put together a pretty sizeable amount.



We got some mild han-racism from one or two of the kids – one child was blanching at the idea that a ‘brown skinned’ person was going to be wearing her clothes… as if Koreans are somehow NOT brown. (han-racism is a pretty nasty undercurrent in some Korean thought – it’s not exactly epidemic, but in some circles, in some families, the idea that the han race – the Korean race – could somehow be sullied by foreign blood is a big fear. Keep in mind Chinese people talk also about han Chinese and how Manchurians are savages… and then think to yourself ‘how pure is a han Korean if there’s also han Chinese? My horseshit buzzer is kicking me in the nuts as I type). We also got some weird Confucian indifference that I tried to combat with “well, what would happen if a ji-jin (earthquake) hit your a-pah-tuh? Your internet would be down for WEEKS! No online gaming, even in a PC bang!!! And that got some of them thinking.

We even had some whitey douche drinker in Itaewon say to us while we were flyering “Pakistan… I don’t know anyone in Pakistan.” Now think about if when the time came to go take out Kim Il-Sung, a few hundred thousand soldiers said “Korea? I don’t know anyone in Korea”. It’s not the ignorance, it was the indifference that made me want to wreck throat. Nobody wants to help Pakistan. Why? Is it because it’s Islamic? Or is it because nobody knows they exist?

Here’s a minor breakdown of the aid provided to Pakistan. This is a biased and very brief account, so if you’re reading and my figures are incorrect, I am open to being schooled on this. I focus on the USA because it’s Rome, but I also focus on Korea because the facts become weird and interesting.

india provided 25 million dollars in aid to pakistan. that's a lot, considering that the two countries have been whupping each others' asses for so many years.

the US has given 510 million.

korean private donors have given 580 million won (roughly 580,000 USD). korean citizens are helping build kitchens in pakistan.

the korean government immediately granted 3 million USD. as of oct. 24, that figure became 7.24 million pakistan rupees... wow, 124,000 USD. ?!?



now... a devastating hurricane knocks major cities in the southern USA on their collective asses. people die. peoples' lives are turned thoroughly upside-down.

south korea contributes, to the richest country in the world... (drum roll)...

30 MILLION US DOLLARS. 13 percent of its foreign aid budget is sent to the USA, a country that should be able to take care of itself when its shit hits the fan (clearly it wasn't able to, and i'm not against people helping people in need... but come on, it's the richest country in the world. why can't it band-aid its own boo-boos?.

here's a pretty self-critical article about korean aid:

another - i like this quote - "If we want to join the ranks of developed countries, we should bear the responsibilities that come with it".

shameful. shameful. fucked up and shameful. i'll say it again, korea gave the richest country in the world 7.5% of its total budget for development aid. it gave pakistan, a country which is in a much less stable or financially comfortable state(and arguably more fucked up than katrina-hit areas due to lack of infrastructure) .075% of their development budget.

i find this truly strange, for a couple of reasons. one thing korea is doing a lot lately is what i'll call "corporate outreach work" - building bridges, seawater treatment facilities and other huge undertakings in developing countries.

"Korean construction firms that build projects overseas signed contracts worth $11 billion in 1996; 70 percent of the work is in South Asia. Korean foreign aid is often granted under the condition that recipient countries use Korean firms for construction activities." says dean yates in migration news

what's more - korean firms will undercut and compete like maniacs for foreign contracts, especially when they get a chance to publicly whup japan's ass at being efficient purveyors of technology. case in point,the tallest building in the world, the petronas towers in kuala lumpur, malaysia. it ended up being a race between korea's samsung corporation and some japanese firm. korea won (and was most likely annoyingly nationalistic about it).



so what boggles my mind is "why isn't korea throwing down, when it can only serve to benefit them?"

the bottom line - aid is conditional. what are you gonna do for me? what the hell can pakistan possibly do for korea? certainly not as much as the US. hence the disparity in aid figures.

here's a nice little bit of fearmongering though, that tickles my bullshit detector a bit. the title of this article is telling... like "let's help these people, or they'll turn into crazy islamic terrorists!"

so it's also a bit like "we'd better throw down, or the middle east will be even more of a powderkeg... that we created" (see discussion of colonialism below).

so yeah, you get my point. the only people who truly give a flying fuck about pakistan are individual citizens, aid organizations and church groups (whose aid is often just as conditional as a government's... tear down your buddhist wat and put up a church, then we'll help you recover from your tsunami).

so yeah, we got together a bunch of clothes and blankets and a couple tents to send to pakistan. we met at the pakistan embassy, hung out, filled up our truck, and took a really weird long ride out to a storage space in pocheon, up near uijeongbu. that's about as far north as you can go in south korea and not start hitting land mines.

the ride home was provided by a really interesting man named shaheed. he's a pakistani man who's been living in korea for 14 years, running a textile printing business.

the intention of the ride was to learn as much about pakistan as possible... because, like korea, it's a country you just don't learn about in canadian high school history.

the section of the conversation that was history-related was pretty simple and had that all-too familiar feel of "colonial power decides to drop the ball on colony because it’s not cost-effective anymore, leaving locals to their own former, yet more festering devices" - something we've heard about before. it almost always seems to end in a bloodbath. see rwanda and belgium. that's the one i'm more familiar with. this one seems to have way too many similarities.

shaheed's observations on the current global perception of islam were much more interesting and eye-opening.

his children are being schooled in london. his (korean) wife is staying with them in london. they go to school there because to go to a non-korean school (really the only sane option for a foreign child here) costs 25,000 USD per student, per year. he applied for a UK visa to visit them... the day before the london bombing. the visa was, of course, revoked, despite the fact that he'd been to england on business numerous times before without incident. to add insult to injury, he'd been asked down to the embassy here in seoul for an interview before being denied. he gets denied, and asks to see a superior officer, with the rationale that "i should be treated with a little more respect. i'm a businessman, i've been to your country before".

the woman replies "if you don't stop complaining, i'll make it so you can never enter the UK again, for as long as you live."

not to mention that he is questioned about once a month by korean immigration, korean special branch, the police who are constantly watching the mosque...

he seems to keep in very good spirits about it all. he's just a businessman, doing business. he's a peaceful, law abiding sort of guy. a nice dude.

which leads me to the question...

how does one create a terrorist out of a normal guy? are people of the islamic faith born with hate and murder on their minds?

no. neglect, then push. that's how you create a terrorist. i could hear the anger in this guy. it was totally justified.

It was a long day, and one of the more interesting ones I’ve experienced here. Hannah put it all together and even if you disregard that fact she’s a golden goddess.