Today I had a shorter 1-2 hour session of painting. The wind was quite still today and the fumes began to bother me so I stopped short. However, the day's highlight was an unexpected surprise.
My parents had told me earlier this week that their friends had wanted to take me out to dinner since I came to visit Mexico, and while I dreaded going because I knew I would be stuck in hours of after dinner conversation that they would engage in, I had no choice and so I ate and I sat. Sitting in between my mom and my dad, I was in the perfect location to hear both the men's conversations and the women's conversations. The highlight came from the men's conversation.
They began talking politics and the Korean embassy, and about the Koreans in Mexico. It seemed that one of the men was very active in the area of Korean politics here and so one thing led to another and my ears perked as I heard my dad ask if he had met with the representatives from the North Korean Embassy. The thought had never even crossed my mind. But what I would hear next was even more to my interest. The man responded that he had run into them at restaurants once in a while, and that they were usually a younger group and so they actually hung out with younger Koreans here in Mexico. Then, he proceeded to say, "actually, there were a whole bunch of them in Ghana in the 7-80's."
As soon as he said this, the other men in the group were surprised to hear such a thing. But me, having read two books on North Korea recently, I instantly tied it with Kim Il Sung's efforts to expand the following of Juche, Kim's version of socialism. I remembered reading in the books that they set up centers of Juche in various third-world countries in an attempt to proliferate their beliefs. It turns out that the man's father was some big businessman in Ghana--to the point that he was in the President's social circle. So the man continued to tell the story of the numerous North Korean representatives that were there, and how they would schedule film showings which were supposed to tell the story of the Korean War (most likely a distorted version) to the public. His father would then order about 50 or so people with specific orders not to hurt anyone, but to stop the showing (I think they went and broke the projectors or caused a scene). He said the North Koreans had a lot of farmland in Ghana, and a fairly large presence, but that they pretty much disappeared by the 90's...which falls in line with what I've been reading.
I don't know if any of that was interesting to you readers, but for me, it was exciting to directly hear someone's narrative that coincided with history that I had just been reading. So anyway, that was the highlight of my day. That little anecdote made the 3 hours of sitting worth-while...almost.
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