reunited

I met JoJo in Korea in the summer of 2008. His Korean name is actually Yosep, which is the Korean version of Joseph, and his family name is Jo. Joseph Jo. Nearly immediately I started calling him JoJo. JoJo was 15 when we met, and at the end of the summer he was bound for Nampa, Idaho, where he was going to attend high school. On his own. Living with strangers. With a very low English ability. I was recruited to make JoJo Idaho-ready, a task much bigger than we could accomplish in our three tutoring sessions a week. I knew JoJo had some rough months ahead after he would arrive in Idaho, and my real goal was just to soften the crash landing: teach him about the culture of small, Christian high schools, inform him about American family life, drill him on basic emergency phrases, boost his confidence and calm his fears.

JoJo survived.

Now, three years later, JoJo is going into his senior year in the fall. Like many high school seniors, he's thinking about college, so JoJo didn't go back to Korea this summer. Instead, he's spending the summer in an SAT-prep academy--in Maryland, just a thirty-minute drive from my place.

JoJo and I have kept in touch. Facebook makes that easy. We had dinner together once in Korea in the summer of 2009 after he had finished his freshmen year, and yesterday afternoon JoJo and I had the chance to meet up again. It was awesome. Teacher-student in the summer of 2008, now we were able to get together and just be friends, swapping stories about culture shock and the various experiences we've had in the last few years. It's a strange twist of providence: JoJo, this guy I met on the other side of the world and only because his parents wanted a private tutor to help their son, is now my closest friend for hundreds of miles.