Starting A New Korea

I drove a trailerful of chairs back to Pilsdon this week. Never a dull moment.

If I were asked what I'd like to see changed at Pilsdon Community, after lodging requests for a sauna, a recording studio and a hundred-foot helter-skelter, I'd probably plump for a greater cultural and racial diversity. Of all the thirty-ish adults currently in residence there are three Americans and the rest are British (with the possible exception of a completely naturalised South African). We are all white. English is the only language spoken.

Now I don't know exactly why this is the case but of course we are deep in rural Dorset, not the metropolis of my former life where pretty much the whole world is represented. Quite a few Pilsdon's residents come from the local area which has a predominantly white population. At least we had a Polish wayfarer come for the weekend recently which made a nice change.

So we were slightly unprepared for the short visit this week of ten South Koreans, straight from Heathrow. I and a few others had at least learnt the word for “hello”. We knew they were from a Christian community called Bargn Nuri in South Korea. We knew they were visiting other communities in the UK after us. We knew that they must have some English to be able to contact us by email in the first place. Apart from that, we knew nothing. It was all very exciting.

They arrived about 11pm on Tuesday night, the coach having struggled up the tiny lanes to reach us. They had had a two day journey to get to us. The four men stayed awake to eat sandwiches whilst the women went straight to bed. It transpired that most were high school students, aged 15-18 years old, accompanied by two teachers, a man and a woman, who had very good English. The students' command of English was more variable, understandably.

The next day dawned frosty and bright. We had saved up the big job of cleaning out all the dirty straw that had accumulated in the two main cowsheds, so we all got to work with wheelbarrows and forks, all of the Koreans and some of the Pilsdonites. They were impeccably polite, friendly and good-natured. None of the teenagers had a strop or refused to work. Despite being tired from their long journey they saw the mucky task through to completion, and then jumped at the chance to do some wood-chopping with our axes. They are apparently well used to this, having wood-fired central heating themselves.

In the evening we sat round in the Common Room and they sang some of their community songs for us and we reciprocated with one or two solo songs. I tinkled on the piano, a couple of them played guitar. Then we got into a sharing of what makes our respective communities tick, what the vision is, how we operate, and so on. They have four rural communities and one urban, in Seoul itself. Education is central. They do farm work, growing crops and saving seed, and they study. The two go hand in hand. The young people are being trained for leadership. As for grand vision, they have nothing less than the unification of North and South Korea.

The next morning they overwhelmed us with beautiful handmade gifts - a straw-woven mat and a head-balancer for water jugs, a calendar hand-drawn by local farmers, bags of locally-harvested pine nuts, delicious brown tea leaves, and other delicacies. And then they were off, joining up with the other ten of their crew who had been at Hilfield Friary, and headed for Schumacher College near Totnes. Also on their itinerary is a Jesus Army community and a Bruderhof community, then they'll be popping over to France to visit Taize, and on all the way to Berlin.


We waved heartfelt goodbyes. “Ann-yeong!” we called. (Handily, it's the same as “hello”.) Even though they had stayed for just 36 hours they had made a deep impression on us. Maybe one day we'll take them up on their invitation to pay a visit to them in (a united?) Korea!

PS This is my last post for a while here, as I'm moving back to Wales next week. Keep an eye out on mattswanoffgrid for updates. Thanks for reading!

PPS Sorry for the lack of photos but maybe 2017 is the year everyone will realise they just prefer words to pictures.

28 Jan update: A couple of people have pointed out that Pilsdon has had many residents of different ethnic origins in the past so how I've described Pilsdon above is only what it's like right now.