" I wish Koreans would respect the religious ceremonies that are held when foreign laborers died."
All about 30,000 Indonesians are living in Korea.
Of them, 98% are laborers, and about 200 of the laborers are marriage immigrants.
All the laborers, except about 200 college students, are male.
The Indonesian ambassador asked that Koreans respect Indonesians' own unique ideas, which console the loneliness of the laborers, and their religious ceremonies for the numerous dead laborers.
Usually Indonesian laborers leave the city on weekends, rent a hotel or condominium in the country, have meeting with a group 7~8 new people, talk with each other, and then enjoy Korean food, take a walk, exercise and so on.
It is said that they calm their yearning for the opposite sex the power of religion.
The embassy is anxious about the fact that Indonesian laborers often die without a clear reason, and the embassy takes responsibility for storing the corpses, contacting the relative in Indonesia, and assumes the costs.
After the inquiry into the death is clarified, the embassy demands that the employers should compensate them, but it has not obtained satisfactory results.
However, the ambassador said that he simply endures whenever difficult problems occur because he does not want Indonesia's relationship with Korea to worsen.
Since there are about 8,000 islands and 200 languages in Indonesia, there is some confusion because Indonesians do not understand each other.
He said that he is so surprised with the fact that today Korea, whose economic level was same as that of lndonesia in 1960s, has achieved astonishing economic development.
The ambassador said that he loves Korea and he wishes that more Indonesian laborers could work in this good environment.