KDI School opened ‘Vobiscum,’ a new café at the Central Library on November 18^th, 2015. This project was initiated by the cooperation of KDI School, Korea Disabled People’s Development Institute and Sejong City Welfare Center for the Disabled People.

This is a second launch of the Café Vobiscum, followed by the first open at Sejong City Hall. The main purpose of the project is to provide a job placement for the disalbed to open up an opportunity to step into the local community. Also, this project enables KDI School to provide decent food and beverage not only to students but also to faculty, researchers and staff.

On this delighted event, Joon-Kyung Kim, President of KDI School, and Lazzaro Heung-Sik Yoo, Bishop of Roman Catholic Diocese of Daejeon participated to give their congratulatory speech. They emphasized that this is the important step for KDI School to improve campus life of students and staff. Followed by the ribbon-cutting ceremony, customers started to rush into the café. Overall, for the opening ceremony, almost 200 people were invited and participated.    

Students as well as KDI School staff will come to this amazing place where they can enjoy and relax with freshly blended coffee or juices. A manager of ‘Vobiscum’, Yun-Young Kim, mentioned that this space was created to offer a place where the diverse groups of people gather and share their ideas and thoughts beyond the boundaries of nations, races and physical obstacles. The menu of the café includes coffee drinks, non-coffee drinks, fresh fruits or vegetables juice and tea. Coffee beans from Brazil, Honduras, Vietnam, and Indonesia are used to provide high quality taste for costumers. Additionally, the café provides with healthy bakery corner including sandwiches, hot dog, salad and homemade yogurt. 

Since the café is next to the library, there is no doubt that this café would create a great environment by encouraging student and staff interaction, as well as offering relaxing time after study and work. Sung Jin Choi, Director of Central Library, stressed that their main goal was to open the library’s own full service cafe which makes readers and staff life more convenient and save time to bring food or drinks. The unique part of the café is that it is a non-profit organization because it offers jobs to increase social welfare of the disabled people. Eventually this café will help disabled people to be involved in social activities and to increase their professional skills.

This project showed KDI School’s efforts to improve students’ campus life and bring social welfare to the people with disabilities who have a same right to use their skills and do labor activities.

By Shokhrukh Normurodovich Avazov (2014 MDP, Uzbekistan)