Ms Jihey Lee was a successful marketer at an IT company when she decided to give it all up in 2008 and set up a social enterprise helping marginalised women.
She opened a restaurant in a small corner of Sangsu-dong, Mapo-gu in South Korea, convinced the food business would be the easiest point of entry for socially vulnerable immigrant women without educational backgrounds or personal networks.
Today, her social enterprise Oyori Asia has trained women across three Asian countries, helping them find their feet again.
Many are like Ms Ngoc Nhon, who arrived from Vietnam in 2006 to marry a Korean, and gave birth to a child shortly after. But her marriage fell apart because of her husband’s gambling addiction. By 2010, she was a single mother with a son she needed to support.
Two years later, she met Ms Lee, and began training to be a cook. Last year, she opened a Vietnamese restaurant, Asian Bowl, which she runs with another young single mother from Vietnam. Her dream is to settle in South Korea while making food from her homeland with other women like her.
The ultimate goal of Oyori Asia is to support women like Ms Ngoc Nhon to become self-reliant. Said Ms Lee: “The reasons women in poor countries choose international marriage are mostly economic. If they had been self-reliant in their homelands, they would not have had to come to Korea to marry an utter stranger.”
Ms Lee has also extended Oyori’s reach to Nepal, where Cafe Mitini in Kathmandu has offered work and barista training to women.
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Source: The Straits Times, 24 June 2017