Saem Market-Fair at the gate of winter

*This article was written with the Maeum Saem Rehabilitation Center homepage readers in mind.

*The names in red are marked for spell-check to be had yet.

 

On Saturday, Nov 20, 2021, a moderate-sized fair was held at a kid's playground in Yeonmudong in Suwon city. It was a chilled yet sunny afternoon. A free meal (curry rice) was included for Ma Eum Saem Rehabilitation Center members. The fair, jointly organized by Yeonmudong Dolbom Maru, an urban regeneration initiative for this area of the city, and Ma Eum Saem Center, showed off some bojagi craft and traditional knots, whilst having making nameplates and your own ceramic cup!　

 

Early on at the fair, the bigger booths, selling utensils and clothing as well as some shiny pink sneakers for children, stood right beside the playground where there were many little exhibition booths from the Dolbom initiative. Also a banner ad was there for each show booth. On the whole a number of local activities and sales booths, including one wishing tree, welcomed a hundred people overall.

 

I caught an 8 year old, rather tall girl in red and asked, "how do you feel?" and she said "Oh, I'm so glad!" who then darted somewhere else. A lot of children were at the fair throughout, enjoying themselves. There was a danceable Balloon performance too - kids were bewitched! They laughed and loudly clapped as the dancing performer gave out balloon flowers and the like throughout the performance.

 

Just before the performance by our Maeum Saem's very own Happiness Band, our keyboardist Beom Jun Kim, who played beautifully by the way, was interviewed too: "We have been practicing for this daily from a week ago. I am hoping we turn out as well." Even though they played only two songs from everyone's favourite numbers, Happiness Band showed flair, much more professionally than ever.

 

Later on, I missed by a hair of my leg the final "Nanta" piece by children and some five or six traditional drummers. The next week I met Hwa Gyeong Kim, our social worker in charge of the fair, at the Center and we talked about the event.

"With passage of the Coronavirus, networking is setting off. As Ma Eum Saem is placed in Yeonmudong, we are once again promoting ourselves here to, and confiding in, the locality that we, their neighbours, are curing ourselves."

Hwa Gyeong also tells me that for instance, two older couples from Ma Eum Saem were at it from cooking curry to operating booths.

“In preparing for the fair with Dolbom festival, we were bound to have a lot of fun. Happiness Band were active there together and that too was much fun. "