Sisters of Charity mark 50 years of work in Korea, Jeollanam-do.

From the official 사랑의씨튼수녀회 site.

"News" from last month with a Gangjin and Pittsburgh connection, as several Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill (사랑의씨튼수녀회) returned to South Korea to celebrate the group's 50th anniversary of work there. The Sisters came to Jeollanam-do in 1960 from western Pennsylvania to found a girls' school, and with their domestic colleagues still operate community centers in Gwangju and St. Joseph's Girls' High School in Gangjin county. The official site has an overview of their work in Korea, and East Asia:

Today, 205 Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill serve in the Korean Province and in 11 dioceses there. Several American sisters are members of the Korean Province, but the majority of its members are native Korean women. Each year, at least one American Sister of Charity volunteers to serve in Korea teaching English as a second language to both sisters and students.

Our ministries in the Korean Province are varied and include a school for children who are blind, another school for children with physical disabilities, and a bakery that teaches vocational skills to young adults with physical disabilities.

The Pittsburgh Press has an article from June 25th, 1960 about the first mission.

When the freighter "California Bear" pulls out of San Francisco Sept. 22 and heads for the Far East, probably the most unusual cargo she ever carried will be stowed away in the hold.
It will be the makings of a foreign mission to the southwestern tip of Korea. In the ship's cabins will be four nuns who have been chosen to start the first foreign mission of the Sisters of Charity at Seton Hill Greensburg.

. . .

Out of the community of more than 800 religious, these four were selected from the many who volunteered when Bishop Harold W. Henry invited the sisters to open a school in the Vicariate of Kwangju, Korea.

The Press has another article four years later when one woman's mother visited the mission in Jeollanam-do. Several articles and mentions appeared in Pittsburgh papers after that---in 1970, 1972, and 1983---interestingly repeating a typographical error in 1964: "Kang Tjin."


Sisters in Gangjin, from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea messageboard.


An early English class.

I was lucky enough to meet one of these women in 2006 through a mutual friend, one of several expatriates in South Korea with a western Pennsylvania connection. And, in an interesting coincidence, I learned last Easter that my mother's aunt's cousin, one of the women who attended the commemoration, lived and taught in Gangjin a couple of years before I arrived.