Friends of Asia is a non-profit and non-governmental organization, based in Ilsan, Korea. It was founded in June 2002 to serve for the general welfare of migrant workers in Goyang-Ilsan area, Korea.
The FOA office started when a group of activists, who are living in the different countries and are working independently and collectively to fight against poverty, protect the children at the border, and to provide alternative education and skills for migrant workers have opened FOA's office.
One
of our co-founders, Prof. Vladimir Tikhonov (East Asian Studies, Oslo
University, No rway) isoOriginally from Russia, he
was naturalized as Korean citizen in 1991 and bears the name Pak Noja.
He was born in St.-Petersburg (Leningrad) in 1973, and came into first
contact with things Korea in 1989, on having entered the Korean History
Department of his hometown university. His first sojourn in Korea was
in 1991. He was among the first Soviet students sent to Korea after the
two countries established diplomatic relationship. Believe it or not,
he was totally fascinated from the first moment he stepped on the Korean
soil.
He was totally
fascinated from the first moments on the Korean soil, by everything: people's
laughters, the smell of warm soil in autumn, pine trees in the mountains
even after having taken the Russian equivalence of Western Ph.D. He came
back to Korea as a university teacher in 1997. Since then he started to
sensed some different things - for one thing, the level of exploitation
of foreign workers was shocking even if measured by the standards of Russia's
wild gangsterish capitalism. He became immensely interested in the ways
of cooperation with Korea's social activists helping the migrant workers,
and that is what he is trying to do up to the moment, though not being
physically present in Korea now (He is teaching Korean and East Asian
Studies in Oslo University since the 2000 year). He devoted lots of pages
to the migrant workers' issues in his essay collection, published by Hangyoreh
Sinmun in Korean in the end of 2001.
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