15 년후

Or, "How did my scanner get so dusty?"

August 18th is the day I got home from my mission. I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, and it occurred to me that it was, in fact, fifteen years since I got home. I'm still not sure how fifteen years could possibly have elapsed since then, but after double-checking the math, I had to admit that this was actually the case. It doesn't feel like fifteen years.

We celebrated the occasion by going out to lunch. I also dug out a few pictures that I thought I'd share.



This is my last companion, Sister Kim Su Kyung, and me (err... I. "This is I." Nominative case. Yep.) at a zone activity. She was a sweetheart. We haven't kept in touch but I think of her every once in a while. My hair was a lot lighter back then! I was also frequently sunburned.

I was serving in Sunchon and GwangYang, way down south, as my last area. I recall it was raining, the morning that I left, which seemed appropriate as I was feeling very emotional and kept randomly bursting into tears. (Maybe not quite bursting, but a lot of welling up.)



There was a group of us going home at the same time, including two other sisters, Lee Su Jin and Kim Sang Kyung. Here we are in front of the Seoul temple. Sister Kim had been my companion for a couple of months, in Taejon. It was nice to get to spend some more time with her before going home. (Yes, I had companions named Kim Sang Kyung and Kim Su Kyung. Two different people.) I didn't ever serve with Lee Su Jin but I met her parents, later, when I was doing my summer internship at a publishing company in Seoul. As soon as I saw her father, I thought, "He looks just like Lee Su Jin!"



And here I am with my family at the airport, after a very long flight. (This was back when Barb was still shorter than me. Ha.) I was only home for nine days and then went out to BYU for the start of fall semester. I had kind of a hard time with the transition, just figuring out where I was and what I was supposed to be doing with myself. I felt like I'd been through such an amazing experience, and changed so much, but it was all inside, and there were things that were important to me that I couldn't explain to anyone else. I was so glad that I got to go back with Doug, later, and share some of that with him. Hopefully some day we'll be able to take Kate (and Baby Boy).



This was lunch today--kimchi jjigae. Our heat wave broke and it was cool and rainy. Just seemed like a jjigae day. (Doug had bulgogi.) Kate was a bit squirmy and kept trying to climb up the back of the seat, but she enjoyed the food and ate a lot.

Yesterday in church we heard from a young man (our stake president's son) who just got back from serving in Korea a few weeks ago (Pusan--though I think they're romanizing it as Busan now, which bugs me). I got to talk to him briefly afterwards. One thing that I really miss is singing hymns in Korean. There are a few hymns that we sing where I have to restrain myself from breaking into Korean on the chorus. It's amazing that I still remember so many of them.

One of these days I'll get around to scrapping my mission pictures. Maybe I'll use one of those photo-scanning services and do it all digitally. A big coffee-table book or something.