Helping Others Helps the Helper Also

By Park Nahm-sheik

I have been a lifelong teacher of English helping people learn to use the English language. I started with private tutorials for any and every comer. This work afforded a decent living for me and my family comprising my widowed mother and my little sister. In hindsight, this was one whale of a payoff for a teen breadwinner of the family aspiring to a career in TEFL.

I was also happy with the noticeable strides made in my command of English as I strove constantly to be a better teacher of the language. As part of my routine, I wrote speeches and stories for my students looking to take part in public-speaking and story-telling competitions. Arduous as it undeniably was, this work proved to be quite instrumental in tuning up my written English.

Inspired by the success of this ghostwriting gig, I dared dive headfirst into a sea of classics available in English. I devoured over 500 volumes of both fiction and nonfiction in just a matter of years. Before long, I got hundreds of thousands of pages of quality English text under my belt. This reading stint greatly expanded my intellectual universe, which was something I used to pride myself on as a young man majoring in English language and literature.

I then proceeded to hone my listening comprehension skills by tuning in to thousands of hours of English-language radio transmissions from all over the globe. My favorite broadcasters were BBC, VOA, and the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (or AFRTS for short).

I was particularly attracted to the AFRTS news dictation program, featuring leisurely phrase-by-phrase reading of up-to-the-minute news. A daily program lasting about 20 minutes, it was tailored to distribute major news items of the day to overseas U.S. military broadcasting outlets. I took advantage of this program by either taking down the news or mimicking the news reader, paying close attention to his enunciation.

The English thus acquired and consolidated stood me in good stead in the years that followed. First, it helped me get a coveted East-West Center Fellowship to the University of Hawaii, where I obtained my master’s in linguistics. Had it not been for this degree, my appointment to the faculty of Seoul National University would have been out of the question. It was a dream come true, pure and simple, for a graduate of a provincial university in Korea.

Even more dramatic, however, was the way English came to my assistance while I was struggling with cerebral infarction. This horrible disease robbed me of much of my memory along with most of my English. Before I knew it, I was succumbing to both dyslexia and aphasia just like that. Most of my mobility also fell victim to this horrible condition.

While making last-gasp efforts to get over the after-effects of this disease, I stumbled across what eventually turned out to be a way out. After going through a series of unconventional tacks to cope with the problem, I figured that written English could possibly come to my aid. I was desperately looking to reclaim my brain somehow or other. As luck would have it, this search was soon beginning to pay dividends.

As of this writing, my memory is around halfway back where it used to be before I got hit with this head-shattering sucker punch. Fortunately, my English is now as much back where it was prior to the onset of the disease. I have also regained much of my mobility. In the process, I have learned that mental and physical mobility/agility go hand in hand. As a result, “Use it or lose it” hit closer to home.

In light of this episode, I now better understand what Rene Descartes meant when he said “Je pense, donc je suis” or “Cogito ergo sum,” which translate to “I think; therefore, I am” in English and “Ich denke, also bin ich” in German.

Before closing, let me make the point here that volunteering is an act of helping. It is then no coincidence that volunteering does a great deal of good for the volunteers, too. At the end of the day, they all get to enjoy a tremendous dose of fulfillment and satisfaction. In this context, altruism and egoism are thus apparently just the two sides of one and the same coin.

God bless the GIC for hosting a whole legion of multicultural activist volunteers for the Gwangju-Chonnam region and beyond! I do believe that God helps those who help others, their neighbors included.

The Author

Park Nahm-sheik has a BA in English from Chonnam National University, an MA in linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, U.S.A., and a PhD in applied linguistics from Georgetown University. He is now a Professor Emeritus after a long and illustrious career at Seoul National University as well as President Emeritus of the International Graduate School of English.