Summer vacation

13 July. Seoul, South Korea.

We are living in the Mangwon neighbourhood for more than 3 months now and apart from some health problems we are happy. Having accomplished more than 3 months in a place where we in principle have the legal possibility to remain as long as we like, makes us pause and think about the world's over 65 million of internationally and internally displaced persons. The migrant crisis in Europe sadly doesn't show signs of improvement, with thousands of people dying at sea in a desperate attempt to reach Europe, and many more anonymously und invisibly during their journey through the desert.

What can we do? We inform ourselves online, question our assumptions, engage in constructive debates, consume less, sign petitions to demand politicians to make decisions that are tolerable. Besides all this, there is nothing we can do. We feel overwhelmed. We just go on with our lives, perhaps waiting for a moment where we can make a difference.

Maybe we travel with our daughter, to a land where people are not wealthy, where they don't have automobiles and air conditioning. I think she can learn a lot from such a journey and would enjoy the more natural way of being it entails. She will love running barefeet, playing games with children who haven't lost their creativity to video games, with children who aren't absorbed by their mobile phone all day. She will love eating and picking fresh fruit, feeding animals, dancing on the street after the rare car passes. She will love making music on improvised wooden instruments and empty bottles, not smartphone apps, splashing in the mud, drawing with charcoal on scraps of cardboard, looking at her own dirty face in the inside of a disposed tin can, playing games with pebbles, washing a piglet, sharing rice with destitute smiling widows, learning how to ride a bicycle with five other children, chasing chickens, climbing trees.

Such things are not possible where we live, but we have the power (money: numbers on a computer) to travel to a place where such things can be done. I will show my daughter a video of what I described and ask her if she actually wants to go. Only for the record, because we will go anyway.