Today’s Korean Phrase:  sugo hada = hard work

The English Village is an educational facility that was born from and owned by the Korean Government.  The Gyeonggi province prides itself on “creating global Koreans” which basically means they want to make sure Koreans start learning English at a very young age.  This way they will become fluent adults that will some day be global businessmen and bring more money back to the Gyeonggi Government (or, something like that, probably…)  There are three different kinds of teachers here at GEV: ODP’s who teach students in the One Day Program for patrons who come to the park just for the day, OWP’s who teach the One Week Program for middle school students who live onsite for a whole week, and the Edutainers (that’s me!). As an Edutainer, our job is to help educate through entertainment (get it? get it? Edu-Tainer? brilliance).

I work Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 to 18:00 with an hour for lunch (Korea uses military time. Ugh). I walk from my on-campus apartment to the City Hall building to clock in, then over to the Edutainer office in the Concert Hall to sign in on the schedule.  We are all doing different things at different times, so our Head Teacher Stephanie has quite a task creating everyone’s schedules.  There are three different shows going on at anytime: the Mainstage Musical, the Little Theatre Show, and the Game Show.  Mainstage is obviously the biggest show, full sets, lights, costumes, body mics, the works.  Right now we are performing Jack and the Beanstalk, an original English musical.  I do that show twice a day Wednesday and Fridays, and three times on Sundays.  There are always two casts so that you don’t have to do every show every day, which would be 12 shows a week for almost three months, which might make you want to kill yourself and possibly take a poor Korean child down with you.  I am also in rehearsal for the next mainstage musical R is for Robot in the mornings and late afternoons around the J&B performances.

As a group, the 15-18 of us write, produce, direct, choreograph, compose, design and all around create these shows from scratch.  I have been so busy with rehearsals that I’m not on the production side of things quite yet, but I know my day will come (might actually start at our weekly Thursday Morning family meeting! We shall see…).  I’ll fill you in on that side of the table when I get there.