austraLasia #2915
 
Annual harvest festival (Chuseok), Korea: "The Greatest Love of All"

SEOUL: 12 September 2011 -- The Fr John Lee sdb phenomenon rolls on.... KBS CoolFM (89.1 Mhz Seoul), is featuring the life of Fr Lee Tae-seok, a Salesian who devoted his life to helping people in southern Sudan, for its special English program for children Sept. 12-13.
     Prepared exclusively for the Chuseok holidays, the show, titled “The Greatest Love of All,” has a Korean introduction by actor Sohn Hyun-joo and child actor Yang Han-yeol. In the show Sohn plays the Yang's father, who tells his son about John Lee’s life.
    The priest's story is then told in English by Lee Geun-cheol and John Valentine, the hosts of KBS CoolFM’s long-time English-language show, Good Morning Pops which has been aired for some 20 years now.
     Kim Kang-hoon, the show's producer, said the program aims to provide an opportunity for its young listeners to learn English while they are introduced to famous Korean figures. “Most kids in Korea read English biographies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy as they try to learn the language,” he said. “We thought it would be nice to learn about Korean figures in English.”
     The show will be publishing a children’s book series in English, along with audio CDs, featuring Korea’s well-known figures and their legacies. A book about Lee will be released later this month. It will be followed by another on Park Ji-sung, who plays soccer for Manchester United.
    The kinds of details covered by the radio broadcast include the following:
    Lee was born in Busan in 1962, and studied medicine at Inje University in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province. In 2001, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and began serving in the small town of Tonj, in southern Sudan. There, he worked as a doctor, teacher and priest. (Not sure if the contents include reference to the fact that he was a Salesian; it certainly does not appear in an earlier report on the show).
     To heal the inner wounds of children suffering through a protracted civil war, Lee also ran a brass band made up of the town’s young people.
     Lee was diagnosed with terminal colorectal cancer during his visit to Seoul in 2008 and passed away on Jan. 14, 2010. His last words, in English were, “Don’t worry. Everything is good.”
     “Don’t Cry for Me, Sudan,” a documentary film highlighting Lee’s life in Sudan, was screened in local movie theatres last year. He was posthumously awarded Korea’s highest order of civil merit in June for his legacy in the African country.
“The Greatest Love of All” is being aired from 6:30 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Sept. 12-13.