Greetings from North Korea!

Hi. This is Xuemei. As most of you have already known, I’m a “pure” Korean who was born in China. I had been educated in China for almost twenty years from kindergarten until college, but I was trained in a traditional Korean manner, which greatly influenced my character. That’s why I’m here.

It has been almost three months since I came to Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea. I’m teaching at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). As the only private university in this country, PUST expects to provide talented North Korean young people with a global mind frame. The students are selected from some top ranking universities. Until March, we had had only 500 male students, but finally, 10 female freshmen enrolled in the Department of Nursing.

I’m teaching Insurance Course in the Department of International Finance. At the beginning of the semester, students argued that life and health insurance is not necessary because whole medical service is provided by government for free. After midterm exam, I asked them whether they wanted to purchase insurance service, and only two students out of 28 answered “Yes”. Some of them also said that our class makes them realize that their socialism system is better than capitalism one. Am I an unsuccessful teacher? Hehe…

There are six residential international organizations such as UNDP, WHO, UNICEF and some non-residential organization such as UNESCO working for development of this country. They have a regular meeting at UNDP office on every Friday, the day I have class. I hope I can attend the meeting at least once before my departure.

After the semester, I will join the Senior Academic Trip to China. The main purpose of the trip is to broaden their eyes and horizon from international perspectives. During this 13-night and 14-day trip, we will visit Beijing and five other cities located in Northeast part of China to experience advanced academic facilities of several universities which offers same majors with PUST and several companies which are also well known in here.

See you soon.