Matchmakers, matchmakers, make me a match

And so the story goes........

The other day Mark(the leader of my team) received a call from a Korean man asking for my phone number. He thought it was someone looking for a musician and passed the guy's name and phone number on to me. I called the man, Joshua, and was a little perplexed after hanging up the phone, because he had never mentioned anything about music. He had only talked about meeting with him and his wife and then they were going to introduce me to someone. I was rather confused, but agreed to meet them in the center of town- today.

Upon talking this over with my roommate, Laura, we decided that it must be some Chinese missionaries that live here that some friends of hers know. Her friend, Tanya, had heard me play recently and had just been talking about me last week, so we were convinced that it must be this Chinese couple, because the man's name is Joshua. Upon arriving at the agreed upon meeting place, though, I found the Korean couple that runs Camp Canaan, the place where we do our English camps. I was thoroughly confused by this turn of events and followed them to a restaurant, waiting to find out why they wanted to talk to me about music. After chatting for a few minutes, the wife asked me if I wanted to be married, because.....................

one of their friends had seen me out at camp and really wants to be married soon and asked them to talk to me about this and arrange a meeting. He is a 48 year old unsaved Korean businessman who barely speaks English. His business has closed here in Odessa and so he's moving soon to Poland and would like meet me and then maintain an long distance internet correspondence, because he can "write in English better than he can speak." He told them that though he is an unbeliever, he really wants to marry a Christian woman like me. After being told that I am a missionary, he informed them that he wants to move back to Korea and that I could be a missionary there, because they also need missionaries. I was utterly stunned by this entire situation and was having a difficult time deciding how to respond to this completely unexpected offer. They explained to me that they had had an arranged marriage and that it worked out quite well for them and that he was a very kind and honest man.

He had actually driven an hour and a half out to the camp three times in the last week and a half trying to convince them to talk to me and they had finally agreed. He told them that I would know who he was, because I had looked at him. I have no recollection at all of him, nor do I recall looking at any Korean man. All I was thinking about was the campers leaving and how soon after them would we get to leave? Poor guy. I must say: it has always been a joke between my friends about how I am attractive to many different ethnicities: South-Americans, African Americans, Indians, Russians, Ukrainians, Serbians, Uzbekistanis, Turks, Georgians, etc., etc., but I do believe this is the first Korean that has ever tried to propose marriage to me. I'm still trying to decide what I think about the idea of an arranged marriage and whether I should feel completely mortified at this happenstance or just laugh hysterically about yet another crazy situation in which I find myself.