Blogging from Bruce
May 26, 2009

Vonda Keon

Tuesday was a sad day. We finally said good bye to our Korean exchange student, Ji Eun. After a week of frantic packing and repacking and weighing and mailing boxes to her parents in South Korea , Ji Eun finally got her two huge suitcases stuffed full and closed and her carry on bag packed.

Erin took Ji Eun and Ping and some friends swimming for the last time on Memorial Day. I had cooked hamburgers and hotdogs and baked beans for them to eat when they came home. Then everyone started moping around just waiting for 2AM to arrive. No one could sleep.

I finished typing a report for a job I am working on. Ji Eun was making sure all of her clothes were washed and packed and she was double checking everything making sure that she had her passport and other travel papers ready for the long flight back to her homeland. She left some gifts for me and Scott and for some other people she wasn’t able to see before she left, so I will deliver those. She finished signing some papers for me to send to the Secretary of State Delbert Hoseman for certification of her grades so she can prove that she went to school here in Mississippi for the past 10 months.

I heard the girls at 1:30 loading her luggage into the van and at 2 AM we all climbed into the big white whale and headed north. The heavy suitcases were riding on the very back seat. Rachael and Leslie were in the next row, Ping and Ji Eun were on the middle seat and I had the seat behind Scott with Erin riding shot gun. Everyone talked for a little while but about the time we got to Paris, they were all nodding off.

The ride was quiet until we arrived at the Memphis airport at 3:45. Scott parked the van and unloaded the luggage and we all processed into the terminal. At 4:30 the ticket counter finally opened and Ji Eun’s bags were weighed. The heaviest one tipped the scales at exactly 70 pounds so she had to pay 50 dollars for that one. After her passport and visa was checked she said good bye to us because she had to start going through the check points.

She started crying and that was all it took. The rest of the girls started crying too. I took pictures of her as she passed through each check point. She had to open her carry on bag and take out her computer and open all the little zipper bags of her things. She had to remove her shoes and then walk through the scanner. Then they re-examined her bags. She finally got all of her things back in her carry-on bag and her computer bag and she turned and waved to us one last time before she head down the concourse to gate 11C.

She is going to be back with her familiar foods and her friends that she has grown up with. But she has changed after living here for nearly a year. She will have to make adjustments just as she did when she arrived here. Her family and I were worried about the swine flu and I made sure that she had a mask and plenty of hand sanitizer with her and I gave strict instructions about not touching her eyes and nose without washing her hands. But then as I looked at the news I saw North Korea was firing off test missiles. So there are worse things than swine flu to worry about.

It seems like only last week we picked up the shy quiet Korean girl at the Golden Triangle Airport in Columbus. She arrived wanting to experience life in the United States. This morning we returned a much wiser, more mature, and much taller young woman to embark on the trip back to her parents and her culture. She will be missed.