Volunteers Seek To Aid Waifs

Hearts, Energies Devoted To Homeless Korean Children

 

WITH UNCACK, Oct. 23-By last August, Dr. Roland Good, of the Save the Children fund, had had a good look at Korea's many orphanages.  Problems were obvious.  Need for health education everywhere.  Untrained staffs, recruited from volunteers whose hearts had gone out to the thousands of homeless children in Korea.  Children running off for lack of proper care, only to be picked up again in truckloads for begging by the authorities.

DR. GOOD TALKED it over with members of the nursing division of the United Nations Civil Assistance Command, Korea (UNCACK) and with the ROK ministry of social affairs.  Dr. Good's idea clicked, and recently 40 students selected from the staffs of 18 orphanages in Pusan completed a 21-day course in hygiene, sanitation, first aid, elementary nursing, and child care.  Korean volunteers came for six hours a day, often walking long distances through heavy rainfalls and returning to do their own orphanage work in the evening.

SUBJECTS RANGED from child psychology to dietetics, first aid, hygiene, child development, and general nursing.  During the training, there was much opportunity for members of the Korean volunteer staffs and other U.N. workers to get to know each other.

"I was moved by simple statements of the Korean women who spoke of their love for the orphans," says Miss Ingrid Bruhn, Denmark, who taught 38 hours in general nursing as well as preparing the curricula.  She recalled Miss An Ok Cho, from the Pusan Kun Ro Hak orphanage, saying:  "When I saw homeless boys and girls who were wandering about, I was so keenly struck with the miserable plight of those children that I resolved to give them happiness and bring them up to be good persons."

THE COURSE mobilized as teachers such persons as professors of Ewha and Seoul universities, the wife of the ROK minister of social affairs, as well as Dr. Good and other UNCACK members from Scotland, Denmark, England, and the United States.

"The problem is far from licked," says Dr. Good,--a medical doctor from Australia.  "But it's a step in the right direction.  We'll need many more such training courses and much help from abroad."  Dr. Good, who is attached to the UNCACK team in Pusan, is the representative in Korea of the Save the Children fund-an organization founded in Great Britain to meet the distress in Europe after World War I and now supported by private contributions and organizations in the British Commonwealth.  According to Dr. Good, its aim is to provide relief to children in need without consideration to race, nationality, or creed.

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