Overseas institutions keen on Hong Kong university towns, happy to help local peers

South China Morning Post - Nov 6, 2026

Leaders of overseas institutions have expressed keen interest in taking part in Hong Kong’s planned university towns in the Northern Metropolis megaproject and stress that while financing remains a challenge, they will collaborate on activities to help ensure projects are financially viable. The university heads also called on the Hong Kong government to provide affordable housing in the new university towns, roll out policy incentives to retain top global talent and clearly define what success...

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[FRIENDS OF KOREA] An American teenager in Seoul in 1967

I was 13 when our family of 10 (mom, dad and eight kids ranging in age from 1 to 15) arrived at Kimpo Airport in August 1966. We arrived a bit prior to the first volunteers of the Peace Corps K-1, because our school started in early September. The older kids attended Seoul Foreign School (SFS) in Yeonhui-dong, behind Yonsei University. In fact, the founders of our school were some of the same missionaries who founded Yonsei, such as the Underwoods, the Allens and the Avisons. Today, there is a statue to Horace Grant Underwood in front of one of the Yonsei buildings. Being born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and at our young ages, none of us kids were very familiar with the outside world, so when Dad (Kevin O'Donnell, the first Peace Corps country director for Korea) told us he got a new job and we were going to move to Korea, we thought he said Berea, a Cleveland suburb near the airport, and wondered why in the world would anyone want to move there. He said, "Not Berea — Korea. It's a foreign country over by China and Japan." This got most of us quite excited, but my older sister wa

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As I trudged across Sinchon Rotary and up the steep walkway to Severance Hospital, I kept repeating to myself a phrase from a childhood story about a train engine: “I think I can, I think I can.” It was a bitter cold winter morning in 1969. Today was the day that I was to come to the hospital and show the doctors in the ear, nose and throat section of the hospital that I could, indeed, get a deaf child to speak. Only days earlier, I had arrived in Korea to volunteer for the Peace Corps at age 23. Once it got around that I had training as a speech therapist for the deaf, Peace Corps Korea Director Kevin O'Donnell urged me to pursue it. At the time, Korea had no speech pathology center. George Worth, an American missionary in Korea, introduced me to staff at both Seoul National University (SNU) Hospital and Severance Hospital. Both hospitals were interested in starting a program but wanted to see how it could work, so they told me to come back the next day, when they could bring me a patient. That's how I found myself "auditioning" for a speech and hearing center. I was confident tha

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