How Does The New York Times Cover International News? We Asked Our Reporters.
Few stories have filled me with as much joy as a dispatch I wrote from Gangjin in South Korea with the photographer Chang W. Lee.
In a rural outpost, we found a school so desperate for new students to keep itself afloat that it began enrolling grandmothers who had never been taught to read and write.
“Writing letters to my children, that’s what I dreamed of the most,” one of the women, Hwang Wol-geum, told me.
I knew I had a story. But not just any story.
This one resonated with me personally, because the schools I attended decades ago in a rural South Korean town have been closed for a lack of students. And reporting it allowed me to meet the sort of hard-working, yet cheerful grandmothers often found in rural towns — even if they happened to be first graders.
I recently contacted some of the people in the article for an update.
Lee Ju-young, the principal who launched the program, said the school had been inundated by media requests after the Times’s story, but decided against granting them, out of deference to the older women’s wishes. “While some were thrilled by all the sudden attention we were getting, others were nervous,” she said.
I would like to be able to tell you the story has an unequivocally happy ending, but that is not so.
The South Korean government’s policy is not to resuscitate rural schools running out of young students, but to consolidate them to cut costs. Daegu Elementary was not allowed to accept any more older pupils.
But the women already enrolled were as happy as ever. A couple even plan to advance to middle school.
Ms. Hwang, now a third-grader, is determined just to make it through elementary school. “It’s hard to learn to read and write at this age,” she said. “I keep forgetting what I learned at school. Sometimes I ask myself what on earth I am doing!”
But bit by bit, she has been making progress.
“Now I can write letters to my children,” she said. “They are still very basic and rudimentary letters. But I am elated. You don’t know what it felt like to be unable to read and write.”
—Choe Sang-Hun
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