hankyoreh

Lim Myeon-gwon

Around 2:30 pm on May 24, middle-aged men in their 50s and 60s wearing red vests were hard at work on a staircase next to the Shinwol 119 Safety Center in Seoul’s Yangcheon District. After clearing away the cigarette butts and other garbage from around a railing fastened at the top of the staircase, they started planted some saplings.

After an environmental beautification activity in which volunteers picked up cigarette butts and scraps of paper along the street for 1km between the Shinwol 3 neighborhood office and the Shinwol 119 Safety Center, the volunteers moved on to make some flowerbeds. “It’s good to be part of a group activity. I was interested in planting trees, and doing something like this brings me some psychological healing after my near death experience,” said Lim Myeon-gwon, 59, who was one of the volunteers working on the flowerbeds. Lim said he expects the sight of a tree he has planted to put him in a good mood.

Just six months ago, Lim was living in isolation, cut off from the world, and it was not until he had a close brush with death in Nov. 2017 that he returned to society. After getting divorced a decade ago, he had lost contact with his children and was living alone in a tiny rented room, paying 200,000 won (US$180) a month in rent, in the Shinwol 3 neighborhood.

Lim’s younger sister had sent mailed some fresh kimchi she had made in Nov. 2017 to his address, but it was returned. She called the Shinwol 3 neighborhood office, saying she couldn’t get in contact with her brother. When civil servants from the office stopped by, they found Lim in critical condition and called for an ambulance, which saved his life. Lim spent two weeks in the hospital before being released.

This is how Lim tells the story: “I was so stressed out by dealing with other people that I drank 50 bottles of soju in three days. After being admitted to the hospital, I took a depression test, and I was in such a bad state that I got a match on 18 out of 20 indicators. I wasn’t even taking my sister’s phone calls.”

Lim had once enjoyed a successful life, working for a state-owned enterprise and then running his own business. But after being buffeted by life’s storms – going bankrupt and getting divorced – he had spent several years by himself in his small apartment without a job.

Fortunately, Lim did not have any other physical ailments. After being released from the hospital after two weeks, he escaped from his tiny rented room and gradually began to reconnect with society. These days, he stays busy outside, cleaning the neighborhood and tending the garden with other single middle-aged men who are in a similar position. Lim no longer reports symptoms of depression.

Lim received a lot of help from the “butterfly man” project (“butterfly man” refers to single men in their fifties, reminding them that they are not alone) that Seoul’s Yangcheon District has been spearheading since the beginning of 2017. Between February and March of last year, the district carried out a total survey of 6,841 men between the ages of 50 and 64 who are living alone in the district. 428 of these men were identified as needing government assistance, and they now have access to 50 programs available at neighborhood centers in the district.

Elderly individuals (aged 65 and above) who live alone are comparatively well covered by the public safety net, as they are eligible for the government’s basic pension and are part of a yearly government survey. But men aged 50–64 often fall between the cracks of government welfare programs, despite being at high risk of “godoksa,” a Korean concept that means dying alone without any family or social connections. Yangcheon District was the first district in Seoul to direct its attention to this issue.

Shinwol 3 neighborhood has quite a few butterfly men: there are over 980 middle-aged men living alone, and over 80 of them are eligible for support. As a consequence, the neighborhood has been running a number of activity programs to reconnect the butterfly men with society, including a beautification program called “Adopt an Alley” and a cultural activity program called “Today’s Another Happy Day.” Through last year, the butterfly men were provided with material support, and this year they are being offered sharing programs and cultural activities.

With the active support of the Shinwol 3 neighborhood center, Lim was approved to receive the basic living allowance, which brings him 430,000 won (US$400) a month. Now that he is free from his symptoms of depression and his desperate financial circumstances, he has been enthusiastic about reaching out to the world.

On May 15, he attended a lecture by Choe Yeong-geun titled “Colorful Cultural Activities.” While sitting at the front, Lim stayed focused throughout the two-hour lecture, jotting down whatever was worth remembering. On the morning of May 29, he also attended a screening of the film “Believer” with other butterfly men.

Kim Du-eok, 65, who met The Hankyoreh at the “Colorful Cultural Activities” lecture, is another enthusiastic butterfly man who is always present at neighborhood center events despite having issues with mobility. Kim was a little late to this lecture, though. He explained that he had been meeting with a local lawyer at the Yangcheon District Office to take care of some family business – drafting a petition for divorce from his wife.

Kim said that his life had been turned upside down when his wife ran out on him after squandering more than 100 million won (US$93,100) that he had earned during several grueling stints doing construction work in the Middle East in the 1980s.

“I’m working on my divorce because I’m told that that’s necessary for applying for the subsidized housing that’s available for basic living allowance recipients. I’ve been so hard up for money that I didn’t even feel alive. My blood pressure and liver count are so high that I fainted on my way to the traditional medicine clinic one time,” he said.

When the district office conducted its survey of single mid-aged men, he was in such a desperate state that he was categorized as a suicide risk. “My life was in such shambles that I kept hitting the bottle. So I kept getting sick and couldn’t do construction work anymore, even though I’d been doing that for 47 years,” he said.

But since joining the butterfly man project, Kim has regained his strength. “I’m one of the first people they call [when there’s a butterfly man event at the neighborhood center], so I make a point of going when I can. These days, I’m even inviting the butterfly man who lives next door to come, too,” he said.

One of the main components of the butterfly man project is a mentoring program. The butterfly men are not the only people who participated in the lecture on May 15 and the street cleaning and tree planting activity in Shinwol 3 neighborhood on May 24; most of them were joined by their mentors, who are paired with butterfly men to be their friends and give them advice.

“It’s hard for these single men to meet up all by themselves. They tend to feel awkward. But during the events, we don’t announce who are the mentors and who are the mentees. That might make people uncomfortable,” said Kim Kang-u, an official on the outreach welfare team at the Shinwol 3 neighborhood center. According to Kim, the mentor-mentee system is one of the major factors behind the success of the butterfly man project.

Kim Dong-ju, 60, a mentor who spoke with The Hankyoreh during the street cleaning event, said that he has been looked after elderly people living by themselves for a long time, through the “new village” leadership program and Red Cross activities. “When they first asked me to be a mentor, I thought [the district and neighborhood office] were trying to pair us up out of concern that these people would die without any connections. No one wants that kind of death to happen in their neighborhood,” Kim said.

But the mentoring program was harder than Kim had expected. The butterfly man that Kim was matched with rejected him as a mentor. Kim did his best, dropping by to give the man coupons for side dishes, but he said it took six or seven months for his mentee to open up to him. “On my first visit, I had no idea what this guy had been through, so I was taken aback when he blew up at me. I think his feelings were hurt because he took my visit as an invasion of his privacy. For the most part, these men only hang out with drinking buddies. So I talked about my home and waited for him to open up. Now we talk on the phone pretty frequently,” Kim said.

Kim said the saddest thing was that his mentee has a chronic condition resulting from a poor diet. Kim’s greatest source of joy, on the other hand, is seeing the mentees getting out of the house and having lively conversations with other people.

“My understanding is that, since the butterfly man project was launched, not one dead body has been found without any friends or family,” said an official at Yangcheon District.

By Kim Do-hyung, senior staff writer

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