Three years in South Korea inspired a passion for sustainability
Katie Leone works in one of a cluster of modular buildings just outside Florida Gulf Coast University’s South Village. When I walk in for our 3 p.m. appointment, she’s with someone else, so the administrative assistant tells me to take a seat and she’ll let Leone know that she’s got a guest.
While I wait, the administrative assistant, Sandy, strikes up a conversation. She asks if I’ve seen Leone’s April Fools’ Day video and when I say I haven’t, she works to find it. “It’s hilarious,” she tells me as she taps away at her keyboard.
The video is hilarious, and provides a look at the kind of person I’m about to sit down with: a funny lady with a passion for environmental sustainability.
When Leone comes out to meet me after her guest leaves, she greets me with a broad, friendly smile. I follow her to her office, taking note of her adorable mouse slippers.
Leone is the sustainability manager at FGCU, but she wasn’t always on this career path. Before she began working at FGCU in 2014, Leone graduated from Ohio’s Miami University in 2008 with both a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts in Italian Studies and Studio Art.
“That was during the great recession, so I had two very useless degrees,” Leone said with a laugh. “My husband — well, he was my boyfriend at the time — he had an English lit and creative writing degree, so we were just going really far fast, you know.”
With the job market plummeting, Leone and her then-boyfriend/now-husband, Jason, took to their university’s career services website as a last-ditch effort to find post-graduate work. It was there that Leone came across an advertisement for a job teaching English in South Korea. She volleyed it as a suggestion to Jason.
“It kind of just came out of my mouth, like almost as a joke, and Jason was like, ‘That’s a really good idea! I’ve never left the state of Ohio, and I would really like to get out of here!’” Leone said.
Leone had studied abroad in Italy, where she stayed for six months. Having loved her experience in Italy, Leone looked to see if she could find similar teaching gigs there, but to no avail. Leone said that because Italy is in the European Union, there was little need for the Italian government to shell out money on visas and expensive paperwork for an American, much less two Americans. It would be easier to get a native English speaker from within the EU.
And so, the couple applied for teaching jobs in South Korea. The recruiting company paid for their flights and put them up for free in an apartment.
Leone and Jason loved South Korea so much, their planned one-year stay grew into three. They spent the first year in Suwon, a small town an hour from Seoul, teaching at a hagwon, which is an after-school academy oftentimes referred to as a cram school.
“Koreans take education extremely seriously, so most Korean students go to school during the day, and then they go to an after-school academy at night,” Leone said. The shift started at 1 p.m., when the youngest students — kindergartners and first-graders — came in for their lessons. By 8 p.m., she was teaching high school-aged students.
“That was cool because I got to see what it was like to teach a lot of different age groups,” Leone said. “But I didn’t like those hours.”
So once that contract ended, she and Jason applied to move to Seoul and work in the public school system. There, they taught English at a regular high school. This time, Leone had Korean co-teachers, something she didn’t have working at the hagwon.
“Discipline was always really hard when I worked the first year,” Leone said. “If the students were acting up, it was like there was nothing I could do. They would pretend like they couldn’t understand me, even if they could.” With the addition of native co-teachers, Leone said, the teaching situation improved greatly in those second and third years in South Korea.
But her time in Korea wasn’t all work. She took a temple-style cooking class and earned a yoga-teaching certification. With the aid of Korean friends she made along the way, she was able to see a lot more of Korea than just Seoul and the small town of Suwon. One year, her boss took her and Jason to his home in Busan, located in the south-eastern part of South Korea, for the Lunar New Year. Other friends took her home with them at Chuseok, or Korea’s Thanksgiving. Twice she visited Jeju Island, a beautiful island off of Korea’s southern coast.
One particular destination that made an impression on Leone was the Demilitarized Zone, also known as the DMZ, which is the area along the border between North and South Korea.
“As foreigners, we’re allowed to be tourists in the Demilitarized Zone, but Korean nationals aren’t,” Leone said. She remembers seeing the large fence separating the two countries, adorned with ribbons and offerings to family members from those who are separated from their families.
Leone said she was never really scared living in South Korea in the midst of the ongoing conflict with the North, except for when the ROK Cheonan sank off the west coast of South Korea. North Korea was accused of torpedoing the ship.
“The one thing that made me feel relief was when my one coworker was just like, ‘I’m 50 years old. I’ve lived with this my whole life. This happens sometimes, everything is going to be fine,’” Leone said. “My family was more worried about me than I was.”
Leone said that because she thought she would be in Korea for a short time, she had decided not to take a deep dive into learning the Korean language.
“My one regret. If I knew I was going to be there for longer, I think I would have bought Rosetta Stone and been more serious about learning the language,” she said.
She did manage to pick up some of the language, first learning to read and write hangeul, the Korean alphabet, which consists of 56 characters.
“Learning to read and write was fairly simple,” she said. “It was a much harder language to learn than Italian, because I couldn’t pronounce or hear a lot of the sounds.”
As an example, she points to two Korean words: 방 (bahng) and 빵 (bbahng). The former means “room” and the latter means “bread,” but to the untrained ear, the two words sound identical. This was a source of difficulty for Leone.
But she managed. She recalls a time when she and her husband went out for dinner alone for the first time while living in Suwon. Since the restaurant was in a small town that was not nearly as globalized as Seoul, the menus were completely in Korean.
“We were reading really slow, but I was like, ‘I bet we can figure it out!’” Leone said. “So I remember sounding something out and I was like, ‘ma-ga-ree-ta… oh! Margarita! There’s a margarita on the menu!’”
Leone said she overcame language barriers with “body language and a big smile,” but pointed out that in Seoul, there is almost always someone within earshot who understands English and will be willing to step in and help out when communications break down.
“They love to show off their English skills, it’s like their favorite,” Leone said, laughing.
Leone credits her time abroad in both Italy and South Korea to where she is today, professionally. She observed how differently the countries handled food waste and recycling — just a few basic tenets of sustainability — and was inspired to work to bring those same habits back to the United States.
She remembers going to a festival in Jindo, a small city in on the coast of southwest South Korea where, a few times a year, the sea parts and creates a nearly two-mile “road” from the edge of Jindo to the small island of Modo. During this festival, people walk along the road to harvest clams and mussels and seaweed, which they use make soup. Korean friends would accompany her on hikes and show her the various wild vegetables in the mountains that could be used in cooking. Seeing these culinary traditions made her step back and examine her experience growing up in the United States.
“It felt like food was just a genre [in the US]: Mexican, Chinese… it felt like I didn’t grow up with an authentic foodscape,” Leone said. “Then I got to experience counties that really had them and it got me really excited and interested in food studies from a sustainability perspective.”
Leone also took note of South Korea’s stringent waste management rules. There, those who failed to properly sort his or her waste were subject to fines. In their apartment complex in Mapo, a district of Seoul, Leone and her husband were made to separate food waste from recyclables and separate those from the actual trash.
“Being new and trying to understand how things go, we got yelled at in Korean a couple times for sorting our waste wrong,” Leone said.
Even ordering take-out was different. Instead of bringing the food in disposable containers as is done stateside, the food arrives on a tray with actual plates and cutlery. Once you’re done eating, the tray and used plates all go outside on the doorstep for pick-up.
“It was like having a lighter footprint and being more sustainable was the easiest thing to do,” Leone said. “I want to make it the easy thing to do here.”
Leone left South Korea in 2011 to start her master’s program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. Inspired in part by what she saw in South Korea, she pursued a Master of Arts in Food Studies. Upon graduation in 2013, she applied at relevant positions across the country. Along the way, she landed an interview at Florida Gulf Coast University.
Leone says that the weather is what made her choose to stay in Florida, but seeing FGCU’s Food Forest made her want to work at the university. Leone has been in her current position since 2014 and doesn’t see an end in sight.
“I love the job that I’m in,” Leone says. “I hope to see FGCU continue to grow its sustainability mission and program. I hope that we can have a bigger focus on it that will have a career path here.”
