미지센터의 청소년 국제교류이야기

As this was close to the wrap-up day about a program for MIZY Youth Council Members, I did a brief interview with Mr. Inhwan Ko, the president of Youth Council Member.

1. What is the reason you keep doing the camp CLIS in different ways, as a participant, mentor, and manager? (Mr. Ko was the 1^st CLIS camper and now he is the general manager of the 3^rd CLIS)

When 2010, the 1^st CLIS was held, I had an immature fantasy about the word ‘international’ as this word looked pretty incredible to me. So, I joined the camp and after 2 months, I wanted to become a MIZY Youth Council Member in order to understand about international exchange better and organize the camp CLIS. However, I faced a lot of operational problem such as mentoring system. As there were a lot of mentors and as their ages were similar to participants, feedback was not much organized, rather it was more close to bouncing personal thoughts. Also, the topic itself had a lot of problems. When I was a 1^st CLIS participant, I was in education team. However, education itself can apply to almost everything: methodologically and conceptually. For example, environment design. The subject environment design cannot stick to one subject as environment is closely related to methodology while design is more conceptual. So, I really wanted to solve these basic, but hardest problems. However, at that time, I was a senior in high school and it was tough to me. Now, I thought that I can somehow contribute more to the camp as a university student, this is somewhat formal, and the real reason is: the CLIS is so attractive. There was a prominent figure called Kyung-hyun Kim who is currently working in ODA, who used to be the lecturer for the 1^st and the 2^nd CLIS. He suggested the idea that we can also do international exchange domestically. Sounds weird but I think is much progressed thought. One of the reasons why we do international exchange is to realize global issues and internalize those problems to solve it. Going to abroad and embracing foreign issues cannot be the most active part in international exchange. That’s what I realized and pretty much convinced by Mr. Kim’s theory. Afterwards, I saw a lot of students who were agreeing with me.

2.     What is the most special factor in the 3^rd CLIS?

Change of the topics seems to be the most extreme makeover. As you can see, topics are changed a lot. The 1^st and 2^nd CLIS used to have the team name performing art, environment, design, education etc. but now, we have 9 one-word topics like water, crack, and money. You know what to do with previous topics. For example, environment. If the topic, environment is given, all you have to think about is to protect environment. So pretty much things are fixed. Youth Council Members were complaining about this problem. What we wanted to do is to make people to have their own creative ideas. With this regard, we came with the MDGs (The Millennium Development Goals), but still they were fixed goals. Worldwide, we know these goals are needful, much to be achieved, and necessary. Indications, programs, campaign, are all set globally, and those things are fairly done by United Nations, not by Youths. We rather thought that the most creative things are from daily life not from somewhere else. Actually, this idea was pretty much supported by the chief of MIZY center, Ms. Young-ju Kim, and she came with the idea of ‘water’ for example, Water, is very useful and essential resource. Water is also a core cause of the conflicts and still many people are combating globally in terms of uneven distribution. Understanding water is also one way to understand one of the global issues: conflicts. Everyone was so shocked when the chief was coming with these ideas. We pondered, how we come up with these ideas, and that we came up with one word in order to be concise and creative. Youth Council Members suggested various candidates such as: pen, light, gun, and culled into 9 words. To wrap up, the fact: difference in topics itself is not that much amazing. We all know it’s just changed. But the background is meaningful to understand 3^rd camp better.

3.     Any difficulties or inconveniences?