The Joy of Service

Al Barnum Leaves a Legacy

Written By Karly Pierre

Photographed by Joe Wabe

Guri doesn’t fidget in Mi-Rae’s arms. The toddler softly coos as she bounces on the teenager’s hip. Mi-Rae lifts the little girl and hands her to Min Song, her doting mother. Al Barnum smiles as he watches them in the restaurant—their tenderness natural and unconditional. A stranger would guess they were a typical family: a mother and her two daughters. For Barnum, a dream will be fulfilled when in a few months that stranger’s guess will be right.

This year, Min Song’s family will adopt Mi-Rae, now 18 years old. Mi-Rae has lived at the Sungbin Girls Home in Gwangju since she was 3 years old. She knows nothing about her birth parents. Despite her beginnings, Mi-Rae is a bright and energetic teenager who enjoys spending time with her friends and weekends traveling the countryside with Min Song’s family. Someday she hopes to be a nurse or kindergarten teacher. Min Song is excited about the day she will see Mi-Rae off to university.

“When I met Min Song, I felt like she understood my mind,” said Mi-Rae. “I always appreciated that.”

Mi-Rae and Min Song first met seven years ago, and Barnum played a critical role in that connection. Since arriving in Gwangju to teach at Chosun University in 2008, Barnum has been a committed supporter of Sungbin Girls Home and has raised awareness of adoption in Korea through Adopt-A-Child For Christmas, a program he created.

Barnum met Min Song after frequenting her restaurant near his apartment. She owned it with her mother, who was a single parent. Because of the initial language barrier, a friendship was struck up with only smiles and kind gestures. Soon, Barnum became a fixture at their family outings.

“I was looking for female mentors for the girls at Sungbin and extended an offer to Min Song,” said Barnum. “She became one of our elementary teachers and developed a strong relationship with many of the girls, especially Mi-Rae…When I began Adopt-A-Child for Christmas, I wanted the word ‘adopt’ to resonate not just for Christmas.”

During the years that she mentored at Sungbin, Min Song got married and eventually had her own daughter, Guri. But Min Song never forgot the promise that she made to Mi-Rae the first day they met.

“She was so full of life,” said Min Song. “So full of positive energy…We made a promise that one day we would be a family. Years later, when I met my husband, I talked to him about her and he agreed.”

When she made the announcement to Barnum, he was overjoyed.

“Bloodlines are very important in Korean culture, so many children are not adopted here,” said Barnum. “A Korean man usually will not raise another man’s child…When I heard the news I felt like the cycle was completed.”

Barnum believes in cycles. The teachings of karma yoga, which dictate that selfless acts of service come back to you, have led him on a journey that has touched the lives of many along the way.

“Service is like giving someone a rose petal,” said Barnum. “You can’t give someone a rose petal without the fragrance getting on your fingers…There is a poem that says, ‘I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted, and behold, service was joy’…To me, there is no greater joy than service.”

As a young student at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, Barnum was profoundly influenced by the school’s focus on community service. The school’s motto, “Enter to learn. Depart to serve,” rallied the student body to donate their time to local charities. He volunteered at Harris Home for Children near his college. One Christmas, he bought a gift for a homeless child and spent the day with her. This experience would later be the model for the program with Sungbin.

Barnum believes in the impact one person’s love can make on a community.

As a teacher, he has interacted with students from all walks of life and places around the world, including Honduras, Bermuda, and the United States. But at the core of his teaching career has been a passion to reach out to at-risk youth.

Shortly after arriving in Gwangju, Michael Simning, a community leader, introduced Barnum to the weekly Saturday programs hosted by expats at Sungbin. Barnum began attending regularly and joined a Christmas party for the orphans later that year. The Korean military hosted the party, providing oranges and other food, but Barnum noticed that there were no presents.

“I’m always looking to see how I can fill in the gap for what the government or a church isn’t doing in the community,” said Barnum. “So the next year, in 2009, I simply went by myself to Sungbin and asked the co-director what the girls needed. She said warm hats and gloves. I asked her how many, and she told me 50. So I decided to buy them.”

Later, a coworker asked Barnum to hang out that Saturday. When Barnum explained his plans for that day, the co-worker asked to join him.

“I bought the hats and he bought the gloves,” said Barnum. “We had two bags. We dropped them off at Sungbin and that was it. My co-worker told me, ‘Thanks for that. That felt good.’”

The next year, Barnum was more ambitious. He asked each orphan to make a wish list of four things she wanted for Christmas.

“I could have just asked people to give a gift. You will take anything if you are poor. But I remembered when I was young I knew I was getting my brother’s [hand-me-downs] for Christmas. I wanted these kids to have something they wanted…I expected to get one thing for each girl. A day after I posted the announcement on Facebook, I had 50 commitments. Two weeks after, I got a commitment of 200 gifts. Every child got four gifts.”

That year, he also arranged for the orphanage to get a visit from Santa. Steve McNally, Barnum’s co-worker who played Santa, had grown up in foster care and was especially touched by the opportunity to be the first Santa many of these girls had ever seen.

Mi-Rae remembers that year clearly. She was in 6^th grade and had requested a T-shirt on her wish list.

“Just waiting for the present made my heart flutter,” said Mi-Rae. “I liked the gift because it was a present from the heart.”

Adopt-A-Child for Christmas has expanded and evolved into one of the most anticipated holiday events in the expat community. Barnum has created a legacy thousands of miles away from southern New Jersey where he grew up.

“My teachers would never believe in their wildest dreams what I’ve become,” said Barnum.

As a young boy, he was stubbornly rebellious. He attributes a lot of that anger to growing up with the shame of poverty.

His father died in a car accident when he was 10 years old. His mother was 50 years old when Barnum was born, so raising a young boy alone as an older mother was a challenge.

“My mother had a third grade education and scrubbed floors for white people,” said Barnum. “So I immediately knew the importance of sacrifice and having a strong work ethic.”

He recalls his mother fondly. He remembers her long black braided hair that twisted past her waist. He remembers the bowls of water and bread that she would leave on the doorstep to feed stray cats and dogs—the reason, he says, he became a vegetarian at 19.

“My brothers taught me how to be tough,” said Barnum. “Do things that a man should do. But my mother taught me the qualities that make you a good human being.”

But Barnum also remembers the look of disappointment on her face when he acted out.

“I was always fighting and getting in trouble in school, which my mother never understood. She would have to leave her day job to come to school and sit in the principal’s office because I was getting suspended. She would ask me, ‘Why are you so angry?’ What was I going to say? Because we are poor?  Because you scrub floors? Because we are on welfare? I would just say, ‘I don’t know.’”

Tired of being teased about his clothing, he reasoned that money was the solution to his problems. At 13, he lied about his age and got a job working in the fields with Puerto Rican immigrants from sunrise to sunset. He bought nice clothes and noticed that people began treating him differently, especially girls. But his anger and behavior had not changed.

“I intimidated everyone, even my teachers,” said Barnum.”…Many of the African American teachers who could have had an influence on me, they ignored me. They wrote me off.”

He never liked school as a teenager. He never studied and often asked his girlfriends to complete his book reports. After high school, he became a draftsman in Philadelphia. But one day a visiting evangelist and Oakwood College student, Auldwin Humphrey, suggested Barnum submit an application to Oakwood College. The acceptance letter that arrived a few months later changed his life.

“I was just determined to get through school,” said Barnum.

Years later when Barnum became a teacher—young, sporting a jean jacket, an afro and a scraggly beard—he looked for his old self in his students.

“I looked for the tough guys that no one would talk to and I made myself available,” said Barnum. “If I could be the teacher that I didn’t get, I bet I could make a difference.”

Barnum owned a limousine service for several years in Los Angeles. The job gave him the opportunity to mingle with and befriend many celebrities, but in the end he decided to return to teaching.

“In LA County because of crime in the neighborhoods, it is really hard for a kid to catch a break,” he said. “The school to prison pipeline keeps kids from excelling.”

He taught at Fontana Christian School and was a counselor for the community. His work there caught the eye of the European film company Denkmal.  They filmed the documentary “Since I’m Here” that shows how Barnum used limousines to motivate his students.

“Years later some of my students’ mothers have contacted me and said, ‘Mr. Barnum, my son said that the influence you had on him in the 5^th grade is still with him today.’”

Throughout his career, he has found that the key to reaching at-risk children is consistency and kindness—two things, he says, his mother taught him well.

“If they find that you are sincere and consistent they will embrace you,” said Barnum. “They’ll see through you if you are fake or have some other ulterior motive and they’ll push you away. But if you are sincere and consistent, a way will present itself.”

Barnum will leave Korea this year, but he is working hard to make his last few months count. Recently, he helped Sungbin arrange a cross-cultural experience with a host family in the United States for six orphans. He helped to raise funds to cover housing deposits and one year’s rent for two orphans who recently turned 18 years old and are stepping out on their own. Before he departs, Barnum hopes to find a psychologist who can help the orphans successfully deal with emotional and psychological trauma they have suffered.

He is proud of the work that he has accomplished and hopes that the Adopt-A-Child program will continue to flourish. Looking at Mi-Rae and Min Song, Barnum is optimistic that the program will not only encourage more adoptions in Korea, but also motivate others to discover their own niche in community service here. He hopes that Adopt-A-Child will be a model that other new projects can emulate.

His strongest advice to others: don’t be afraid to go it alone.

“You have to have passion,” said Barnum. “You’ve got to know you’re the only employee that you can count on. When I started Adopt-A-Child, I wasn’t thinking that I needed 10 people to help me. Whatever you decide to do, you have to know that you can do it even if no one wants to help you.”

At the restaurant, Mi-Rae pinches Guri’s cheeks as Min Song takes the little girl’s hand. They are preparing to leave. But Barnum has one lingering question.

“Why were you so nice to me when I first went to your restaurant?” Barnum asks Min Song.

Min Song smiles.

“I think I wanted you to be the father I didn’t have.