Seoul, Korea
Tuesday 12 November 2019
Today, we visited the $40-chocolate expert, a professor at Yonsei University, and he was well worth the $40 and then some. Learned all sorts of things and was informed of all of my typing errors (very painful—it is a draft!) but many improvements and new material offered for “Korea 
1908”—and answers to questions I had no way of locating. He vetted only the first half, and next Monday we return for additional information. For “Korea”1908,” this trip has proved invaluable.
We went first to Severance Hospital, a glass-and-steel white behemoth that extends skyward farther than the eye can see; within an equally white Christmas tree and Christmas decorations were arranged. Outside were more naturally colored flowers, so many, photos that I forgot to take. The temperature here is surprisingly mild and today sunny. Just below the Hospital building is another towering white behemoth, headquarters for the War on Cancer, obviously sustained by unimaginable sums of money.
It is interesting the extent to which something can grow from a small act and one person’s vision. The Methodist Episcopal Church had become involved in missionary work early in the game, and their Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society had been supporting missionary work in China and Japan with scant evangelical success. Yet the WFMS of Revenna, Ohio, met regularly to champion the cause, despite any visible evidence of heathen regeneration. One “dear old lady,” whose name and background story are not included in the records I have available, felt strongly, for whatever reason, that Korea should be a field of endeavor for the Methodist missionaries and, specfically, that the girls and women of Korea should be given care. She presented to the Society “a “small sum of money dedicated to God” that she wished to be a nucleus drawing sums sufficient to send Methodist missionaries to Korea. Only one year later, Mary F. Scranton was appointed to the Korean field, and in June 1885, she reached Seoul. In Seoul, she opened a small school for girls that ultimately became Ewha Unversity, now the largest university in the world for women. From such small beginnings—and yet we do not even know the name of the “dear old lady.”
