[vol.7] Feature_The People Associated with the Tuntun Children's House
WORKING WOMAN 2008. 2. 1. 18:27Hwang Hyun-Sook (Seoul Women workers Association)
It is worse if our children are in the hands of a stranger. We wonder if they are fed well, and worry about them not receiving as much love as others who spend all their time with their mothers. The worries and fears keep going on and on.
Considering this, the children and parents associated with the Tuntun Children's House are those who are unusually lucky. Everyone who first steps into the children's House always says that the atmosphere of this place is as comfortable as our own home. That is why I decided to send my child here when he could not adapt himself elsewhere.
It was not easy to build such a Children's House. It is due to the efforts of the teachers who tried to build a model children's house to bring up the children appropriately while receiving the least amount of activity funds since 1989 that has made it possible.
The Regional Daycare Center Association in the Kuro region which is now the southern area nursery teacher's association helped the teachers not to lose their courage, as well as the volunteer workers and the members of the aid associations. The tender love of these people are alive in the breath of the children brought up in the Tuntun Children's House.
Actually, daycare center problems can be more easily solved with the efforts of the government, and that is how it should be. Children, however they are born or brought up, have the right to receive proper nurturing services as a member of the society. Even considering this, the government regards childcare policies as still the responsibility of each household.
However the efforts to take social responsibility for childcare, has already nonofficially become a movement. The Tuntun children's House has led this movement and is now stabilized.
The Uncles and Aunts of Tuntun - the voluntary workers
The children in the Tuntun children's House have many uncles and aunts. There are many episodes about the children not being able to tell the difference between their real relations and with the voluntary workers. Anyway the children call their student voluntary workers 'uncle' and 'aunt'. That maybe the reason why they are so close to the student voluntary workers.
The Tuntun children know about a lot of universities considering their age. The schools of the uncles and aunts who worked in Tuntun as a team include Seoul, Ewha Women's, Sungsil, and Myungji Universities.
Presently thirty uncles and aunts from Aronsemi in the business department of Sungsil University, and Onnuri in the child education department of Myungji university take turns in groups of three to four to visit the children's House everyday. Aronsemi started to come from 1989, and their juniors still visit today, and Onnuri started coming from 1993.
About the time when morning snacks are over, when there is the sound of opening gates and the cheers of children, it is surely the coming of the uncles and aunts. The teachers get a little bit jealous since the cheers are louder than when they come in, but it is still a pleasure to see them come. After the heart warming welcome from the children is over, the uncles and aunts start preparing meals with their aprons on.
Thanks to this, the children do not find males wearing aprons strange or inappropriate. They even scold their fathers saying why is dad reading the newspaper when mom is working in the kitchen? After lunch, the voluntary workers wash the dishes, help the children brush their teeth, clean the rooms and send the children to sleep telling stories and singing lullabies; though there are times when the children send their uncles and aunts to sleep. The work the voluntary workers do in the Tuntun Children's House is more like a nursery teacher than a voluntary worker.
Also, they open a one day pub to financially help the Children's House each year near their school and send all the funds raised to support the Tuntun Children's House. Also, the uncles who graduated and obtained a job are preparing an aid association to send funds from their first salary.
The uncles and aunts help relieve teachers from work overload, raise funds and most of all give much love to the children. It is hard to help the children release their energy without the help of young men, and the uncles are of great help. Maybe this is the reason why the children are brought up so vitally.
It will not be easy to do all the difficult work without love for the children, yet the uncles and aunts say they learn a lot from their activities in the Tuntun Children's House. They could be an extraordinary new generation. Anyway it is impossible to think of the Tuntun Children's House without its uncles and aunts. It is because they have become a part of the system.
The Aid Committee and the Mother's Committee support parents and neighbours
The mothers who sent their children to the Tuntun Children's House in the past have a meeting every month as a Childcare center aid committee. 'What would have happened to our children if there was no Tuntun Children's House?' The parents of the now elementary school students still shudder from the thought. They had to work to maintain the household, their children were too young, and the private daycare centers were too expensive to afford. The mothers are more thankful to Tuntun because those were hard times.
The circumstances have not improved much since then, but the mothers set up the committee to show their appreciation in one way or another and also wanted to continue the friendship they had built with other mothers in the same situation. It would have been difficult to set up a committee with only the concern and love for the children's house if there did not exist a mother's committee each month while their children were still being sent to the children's house.
The purpose of the mother's committee was to take responsibility and have concern for the management of the Childcare center, and have care for other children there as their own. Also, it was to learn how the children are educated there, have discussions, and to have consistency in the education of the children in the household as in the children's house. The father's committee was combined into a parents' committee but is now separated. So the fathers' and mothers' committee have a monthly meeting and receive lectures and carry out discussions.
The committee does various activities which are publicized in a bulletin written by a mother. For example, to open a bizarre, we have to begin preparations a month early. We have to contact all our neighbors and collect clothes and other materials. After work, we sort the clothes and estimate the price. The prices vary from 500 to 5000 won. The mothers who work in fabric factories borrow irons from their workplace to iron wrinkled clothes. The fathers draw posters and the mothers put them up in places where it is easy to attract attention.
On the day of the bizarre, the mothers and fathers come early in the morning to carry around materials, set them up and sell them. It is a good chance to become friends with others and a good way to raise funds for the children's house, though it is rather upsetting that this is the only way the children's house is maintained. When will Korea have a satisfactory system which will enable our children play in a large area? The mothers and fathers committee is a way for the children's house to share all these possibilities.
The Childcare Center Teacher's Association
The teachers of the Tuntun Children's house share their problems and find solutions together to improve the children's programs. They have been carrying out activities for ten years as a regional daycare center Association, but changed to the Southern nursery teacher's Association (the Kuro region as an example) united with the Civilian Daycare Center Facilities Association.
Since the daycare center facilities were very much in need in the beginning, their activities centered around movements such as: the movement to build a children's house; the movement to establish childcare laws, the movement demanding the revision of amendments and improvement of policies, and the demands to revise policies to incorporate civilian childcare centers into the government's child-care policies. It was impossible to raise the children appropriately without solving these fundamental problems.
Also, they carry out discussions and go over concrete problems such as "What should the authority of teachers be like?" "proper playing is a preparation for future work," "Male? Female? Sexual equality education" to teach the children a proper sense of value and proper behavior. Also they made small committees such as a "picture book group meeting" and "let's go out and play" to provide opportunities for children to read good books and make outdoor problems.
In the Declaration of the Establishment of the Daycare Center Teacher's Association, the teachers vow that they will act together in all activities connected to the proper upbringing of the children as follows: The daycare center teachers association that we are newly establishing will work to make a new model of the childcare movement and activate the voluntary and independent participation of all daycare teachers.
In other words the new childcare movement includes the following: looking for a new way to carry out childcare activities to improve quality; trying to improve all aspects of childcare programs; finding a reactive counterproposal for education; and to carry out activities to improve the situation of teachers and promote happiness in their lives.
The teachers of 'Tuntun' have an unusual amount of overtime work because of the reality that it is hard to gather with other teachers except at night. Yet, because of these efforts, the children at 'Tuntun' are growing up to find happiness in their attitudes.
There are a lot of others who participate in the Children's House with concern and love such as those who support the Child House individually, and 'aunts' who organized aid associations with colleagues because they can no longer work voluntarily because of lack of time. Anyway, those who participated in working for the Tuntun Children's House have tried hard to achieve the socialization of childcare and to become a model daycare center.
Still, Tuntun Children's House has many handicaps such as lack of space, and the government still has many problems to solve. To make a society that has children playing and parents working without any worries, programs like those carried out at 'Tuntun' should be established, and fundamental solutions should be provided according to the viewpoint that this is the responsibility of the society.