S. KOREA RETURNS 40-YEAR-OLD FAVOR WITH ‘SURVIVAL BOX’
Forty years ago, Paul Courtright went to South Korea as a Peace Corps volunteer, helping a third-world country find its footing after decades of foreign occupation, poverty, disease and war .
With the United States reeling under a surge in novel coronavirus cases, South Korea returned the favor. It recently sent “COVID-19 Survival Boxes” to Peace Corps alumni in the United States.
When his box arrived at the Rancho Bernardo home he shares with his wife, Courtright found 100 face masks, anti-microbial gloves, a folding fan, instant coffee, candy and silver chopsticks decorated with turtles (a symbol in Asian culture of good fortune and long life).
“The irony of having South Korea send us COVID-19 supplies and gifts is not lost on any of us,” Courtright said.
When he went there in 1979, at age 24, it was a country playing catch-up, industrializing rapidly but still dotted with impoverished rural communities. The one where he worked was a resettlement village for people with leprosy.
Courtright was a “fixer” who took people to doctor appointments on some days and made his “rounds” on the others, visiting villagers in their homes — “a lot of walking,” he said — to check on foot and hand ulcers and to make sure they were taking their medication properly.
“My village was poor — many homes still with roofs made from thatch,” Courtright said. “Yet the people used to bring me eggs, sweet potatoes and rice. They looked after me. Now, 40 years later, this same country is sending us a box to say ‘thank you’ — incredible.”
The survival kit came with a letter, too, from the president of the Korea Foundation, the diplomacy arm of the government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“Thanks in no small part to the help received from the Peace Corps,” the letter said, “Korea has since achieved an economic breakthrough.”
In 1964, as measured by its gross domestic product, it was among the poorest countries in the world. Now it’s one of the richest.
South Korea’s response to the novel coronavirus — aggressive testing, contacttracing and isolation — has been considered top-notch, too, even as it deals with its own recent spike in cases. Since the pandemic began, the country has reported about 59,000 infections and 859 deaths.
No wonder it looked at its friends in the U.S. — which has seen more than 20 million cases and 350,000 deaths — and thought to send care packages.
Finding a calling
The Peace Corps program was started in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, months after he told Americans in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
With a stated goal of promoting world peace and friendship (and an understated one of fighting the spread of communism), the program sent about 750 volunteers to 13 poor nations in its first year. By the end of 1963, 7,000 people were serving in 44 countries.
Now on hold because of the pandemic, the Peace Corps has deployed more than 235,000 volunteers to about 140 different countries throughout its history.
About 2,000 of them went to South Korea from 1966 to 1981 to work in education or health care. For some, it was their first time living outside the United States.
Not Courtright. His father was a pilot under contract with the State Department and that meant jobs in Iran, Taiwan and Australia, with family in tow. “I grew up overseas,” Courtright said.
After he got a bachelor’s degree in education from Boise State University, he signed up for the Peace Corps, which asked him if he would go to South Korea and help leprosy patients.
He didn’t know anything about leprosy, an infectious disease that mostly causes nerve damage and skin lesions and was once thought to be so contagious and incurable its victims were sent
into isolation in leper colonies on islands and in remote places.
Doctors have learned it doesn’t spread easily and it’s treatable, but stigma still surrounded the patients in Korea, Courtright found when he arrived there after three months of Peace Corps language training. And he noticed something else —
about 10 to 15 percent of the people were blind.
“I was amazed by the different eye complications that they had,” he said. He started taking a four-hour bus ride every Monday to a hospital where an ophthalmologist treated leprosy patients. He took what he learned back to his village of about 600 people, and then to other resettlement communities.
And then he turned it into his life’s calling.
When his two-year Corps assignment was over, Courtright returned to the United States and got a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and a doctorate from UC Berkeley in public health. Then he set about trying to prevent blindness, mostly in Africa, where he and his wife, Dr. Susan Lewallen, founded the Kilimanjaro Centre for Community Ophthalmology.
“Korea taught me many things, and it gave me my career,” Courtright said. “I always felt it had given me far more than I had given it.”
Which, he said, made the “Survival Box” all the more touching.
Instant coffee
To an outsider, it might seem odd that a care package from Korea would arrive with instant coffee instead of tea.
But coffee is what many of the Peace Corps volunteers drank, said Gerard Krzic, who taught English to middle-schoolers when he was there from 1977 to 1980.
“The coffee brings back memories of the people you shared time with,” he said. “It was nice to get the COVID supplies, but it was the cultural items in the box that really gave it meaning for so many of us.”
Krzic lives now in Athens, Ohio, where he directs an English language program at Ohio University. One of his colleagues at the college is his wife; they met in Korea while he was there in the Peace Corps.
“It was an experience that changed my life,” he said, “and that was true for a lot of us.”
Many of the former volunteers belong to Friends of Korea, an alumni group.
Krzic is the president. When the Korea Foundation decided to send out Survival Boxes, it contacted the Friends group for names and addresses. Boxes have gone out to about 550 people, Krzic said.
Some of the former volunteers, especially those feeling isolated during the pandemic, report being brought nearly to tears by the gift.
“There was something magical about the box,” Sandra Nathan told the New York Times after one arrived at her home in Stephentown, N.Y. “Some people, Korean people, very far away wanted to make sure that I was OK; that I had what I needed to fight a bad disease. They behaved as though they cared and were responsible for me.”
Courtright was so moved he emailed a thank-you letter to Geun Lee, president of the foundation that sent the box. “You should be proud of the beautiful, enchanting, fascinating, and welcoming country you call home,” he wrote.
Lee quickly emailed him back.
“Though decades have passed, the country where you spent years of your cherished youth has not and will not forget that affection,” he wrote. “We return it and will continue to pass it down from generation to generation.”