Culture : Some Points of Light in South Korea : * Volunteerism is slowly catching on as several people are dropping out of their mainstream lives to work in Peace Corps type programs overseas.

MAGOK, South Korea —  “We live in an age of selfishness,” Seong Baek Ju complained.

Seong, 31, was explaining why his wife, his father and his colleagues at work opposed his decision to end a 10-year career as an agricultural extension worker and give up an annual income of $25,000 to accept a job that will pay him only $3,360 a year.

Beginning this fall, he will go to work for two years for the Agricultural Livestock Department of the government of Papua New Guinea, a Southeast Asian nation that suffers tribal strife and where life to most South Koreans appears primitive. And he will have to leave his wife, his son, 5, his daughter, 3, and his father at home.

Seong has joined Korean Youth Volunteers, a South Korean version of the U.S. Peace Corps that this nation--itself one of the largest recipients of Peace Corps volunteers and other American aid in the past--established just last year.

It is part of a fledgling foreign aid program that is coming neither naturally nor easily to South Korea.

Indeed, South Korea still bears a net foreign debt of $10 billion. Deficits have returned to the nation’s trade. And large pockets of poverty still persist at home.

“Many people say that if we are well enough off to send volunteers overseas, we should be sending volunteers to help the poor at home,” said Bae Yong Pha, deputy director of the Human Resources Cooperation Department of the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA).

A government program to train foreign workers that was launched years ago initially was conceived as a counter to Communist North Korean efforts to increase its influence in the Third World. But now South Korea’s aid is taking on a new dimension of bolstering the nation’s status by assuming an international burden in line with its economic growth. As with most donor countries, some of South Korea’s aid is also tied to the purchase of its own goods and services.

Although cumulative aid loans will reach $335 million this year, official development assistance in 1990 amounted to only $89.3 million, or 0.04% of the country’s gross national product. Finance Ministry officials have proposed increasing aid, including other contributions to international agencies, to $1.3 billion by 1997.

Expanding the aid program has been an uphill struggle, however. Even Korean custom has worked against it.

Confucian ideals, for example, tend to keep sons at home to care for parents and induce daughters to seek “the greatest happiness in life”--marriage and motherhood--rather than going overseas as volunteers.

Of the 47 initial volunteers who were sent last year to the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, seven dropped out and came home because of language difficulties and cultural problems, Bae said. Only 153 youths applied this year, and five of the 45 volunteers who were selected quit in the middle of a three-month training program, he added.

Seong, an only son obligated under Confucian tradition to care for his widower father, said his colleagues at work and his wife as well as his father opposed his decision.

“Everywhere I turned, they opposed me. They had trouble understanding that by sharing yourself and respecting others you wind up respecting yourself,” he said. “We live in an age of selfishness.

“Of course, I will lose materially, but spiritually I will gain by becoming more mature,” Seong said. “It took me four days to persuade my wife to let me go. I told her that life is not material wealth alone--that you can accumulate material wealth and lose it all in one day. But spiritual wealth you accumulate will never be lost.”

The separation allowance he received when he left his job, plus income from a small farm he owns, will “keep the family going” for the two years that he is gone, he added.

Seong and 39 other volunteers are undergoing training at a government camp in this village nestled in the mountains 27 miles southeast of Seoul--learning native languages, getting accustomed to going barefoot and learning to tolerate customs that South Koreans consider barbaric, like eating food with the hands and living in homes that keep animals below the living quarters and have no water or toilets.

They also are studying the history of tribal rivalries and racial strife in countries none of them have ever visited, and preparing to cope with easy-going and slow-moving cultures that are the antithesis of their own.

Choi Youn Mee, 25, is forcing her fiance to wait two years to get married and giving up a job that paid nearly $21,000 a year to go to Nepal as coordinator of the Korea Youth Volunteer team there. She was a reporter for KBS, the governmental nationwide radio-TV network.

“That was a good job. You could watch the world go by. But I’d rather be a participator than a spectator,” she said.

Her parents were initially worried, she said. “They thought Nepal was a primitive country.” And her mother, “like all Korean mothers, wanted me to get married,” she said.

Jo Jae Hee, 26, who gave up her job as a high school language teacher, said her parents, too, believe that “a woman’s happiness in life is found in a husband, a household and raising children. They objected vehemently, but since it’s my life, they had to agree.”

Jo said she will be going to Sri Lanka to teach Korean to adults seeking jobs in a growing number of Korean factories that are being set up there.

Mila O. Resma, a Filipina hired to help train the seven volunteers who will go to her country, said she has given similar training to volunteers from the United States, Japan, England, Canada and the Netherlands.

A “pitfall” into which many of them have fallen is “coming to the Philippines with a definite plan--a messianic desire to save,” she said. Americans, she said, are the most prone to this approach. Many come “with an arrogant attitude” of superiority, she added.

Japanese and Korean volunteers are “very studious, although the Koreans are more aggressive and very participative. They define what they want to do. The Japanese just tag along,” she said. Both the Japanese and the Koreans send only experts, while the U.S. Peace Corps, she said, “sent some people who weren’t expert at anything.”

The Magok center teaches all of the volunteers how to play traditional Korean musical instruments, and most of them are also well versed in song and dance, Bae said. They also learn the music and dancing of the countries to which they are dispatched.

Thirty-two hours of the three-month training is devoted to “work ethics,” a seemingly strange course for a nation whose people put in the world’s longest work week--54 hours. “They learn menial labor--things like polishing floors” that Confucian ethic frowns upon, Bae said.

The pay the volunteers receive--a uniform $280 a month--is low by Korean standards, but “a Cabinet minister in Nepal gets (only) about $200 a month in pay,” Bae said. And when the volunteers come home, they receive a separation allowance of 4.8 million won ($6,667), he added.

Although South Korea has already invited more than 5,000 trainees from abroad, its foreign aid program took official form only in 1987 when an “economic development cooperation fund” was established within its Export-Import Bank. Last April, programs managed by various government agencies were amalgamated into a single agency--Bae’s Korean International Cooperation Agency.

By the end of this year, KOICA will be financing 19 projects in 17 countries worth $335 million--all tied to the purchase of Korean goods and services.

Lee Chong Moo, director of the Foreign Ministry’s international economic affairs bureau, said foreign trainees find Korean technology, “which is not so highly developed, readily applicable when they go home.”

Korea also has attracted attention as a model for development, he said. Recently, 30 Mongolian government officials spent 40 days at the Korea Development Institute “learning how we make economic plans.” Countries from East Europe also have sent study delegations, he added.

Lee Jong Ho, director of the Finance Ministry’s International Economic Cooperation Bureau, described as “my personal hope” a goal of a tripling of economic aid to the equivalent of 0.1% of the GNP by the time South Korea joins the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the mid-1990s.

Ultimately the government plans to raise aid to 0.3% of the GNP, the Foreign Ministry’s Lee said. That figure would give South Korea an aid program of more than $2 billion by about the turn of the century. Already, he said, South Korea has received requests for aid totaling more than $1 billion.

The Korean Youth Volunteers, too, has received requests from 30 countries for the dispatch of technicians, Bae said.

This year, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Thailand were added, and next year, Bae said, a group of 120 volunteers will be sent to 15 countries in all, including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as well as nations in Africa and Latin America.

Where Korea Helps

Countries currently receiving South Korean development aid or youth volunteers:

Fiji (both)

Ghana (aid)

Indonesia (both)

Jordan (aid)

Nepal (volunteers)

Nigeria (aid)

Papua New Guinea (volunteers)

Peru (aid)

Philippines (both)

Sri Lanka (both)

Thailand (volunteers)

SOURCES: Korean Youth Volunteers, Korean International Cooperation Agency