Together We Will Be Known as a Catalyst for Change

“You can only know where you are headed, when you know where you've come from.”

Ae Ra is a beautiful young woman and a talented musician. Both of her parents died at a young age and she was left with her two younger brothers. When she decided to make the dangerous escape out of North Korea, she had no idea that her life in China would be even worse. Upon making it across the border, she was sold to a Chinese man with whom she had a daughter. Desperate to change her situation and dreaming of a better life for her daughter, she was eventually introduced to LiNK and was given an opportunity to safely escape and find freedom. Together with her daughter, they are re-building new lives in South Korea.

When I hear stories like Ae Ra’s, especially of young women who are of similar age, I can’t help but wonder if this could have been my story.

About 70 years ago, my grandmother left North Korea, not knowing that it would be the last time she would ever see her family again. She eventually made her way to South Korea where my mother was born, and almost twenty years later, my mother immigrated to the United States where I was born. If my grandmother had never left North Korea, our lives would have been vastly different.

Growing up, I knew very little about North Korea and it wasn’t something my parents or grandparents ever spoke about.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that I finally began to learn about the atrocities of the North Korean regime and the extreme challenges that the North Korean people have been facing for decades. I was shocked when I find out that over a million North Koreans had starved to death in the late 1990’s; that a country of 24 million people had no access to the internet or really the outside world; that this ruthlessly efficient system of political control was enforced by punishing three generations of a person’s family in a network of political prison camps; that North Korean women who managed to escape the country were being trafficked or sold to Chinese men.

I was angry, sad and overwhelmed by the scale of the issue and the incredibly small response.

After all, what could average citizens, like me, possibly do to support the North Korean people? I wanted to be used in some way for this issue, even if I didn’t have much to offer. And I realized that there were probably other people, too, who were looking for the same opportunity. Two years later, I decided to leave my job in corporate America and join Liberty in North Korea, an international NGO I believed had the potential to make the most critical impact on this issue.

“Together we will be known as a catalyst for change.”

It has been almost ten years since I began working with LiNK, and one of the things that I am always in awe of is the incredible tenacity and creativity of the people I work with. Despite being an issue that sometimes seems impossible, our team refuses to give up on the North Korean people. Instead they have fought to seek innovative ways around some of the ugly realities of this issue. One such reality being the challenges that North Korean refugees face in China. Not only does the North Korean regime make it illegal to leave the country without state permission, the Chinese government will not protect these North Koreans even if they manage to escape across the border safely. North Korean refugees who are caught in China are forcibly sent back to North Korea where they are at risk of harsh punishments including brutal beatings, forced labor, forced abortions, torture, or being sentenced to a prison camp. Those suspected of having had contact with South Koreans or Christians in China receive the most severe punishments. Many North Korean women who escape into China are at high risk of being forced to work in brothels or online sex chat rooms, or are bought and sold as wives – some for as little as $200. But despite these circumstances, every year thousands of North Koreans still risk their lives in order to escape.

One of the programs we are most excited about is our refugee rescue program, which has provided a life of freedom for North Korean refugees like Ae Ra and her daughter. Typically, North Korean refugees have to rely on paying costly fees to brokers to bring them out of China and along the way they are sometimes exploited even further by these brokers. But by establishing our own network of partners in this “modern day underground railroad” that extends 3,500 miles from the border of China and North Korea all the way down to Southeast Asia, we are able to safely bring North Korean refugees to freedom at no cost or condition to them. Most importantly, these individuals will finally have an opportunity to fulfill their absolute potential without being held down any longer by a regime that had kept them in an enforced poverty.

“Leaving behind something that is life-giving.”

A good friend once shared that he defined legacy as “leaving behind something that is life-giving.” In the last few years, we have helped to bring more than two hundred North Korean refugees to freedom, reuniting almost half of them with families they had been separated from. For some young North Koreans, this new life has meant opportunities to pursue dreams that had once seemed impossible; for parents it has become an opportunity to provide a very different life for their children – a future they could have never imagined; and for many, it is an opportunity to work for the liberty of their country and the friends and family they have left behind. For these brave and courageous individuals, their escape from North Korea will be their legacy for future generations to come. And for the countless individuals around the world who have funded, supported and enabled these journeys to freedom, they are a part of an incredible legacy of our generation – one that believes in empowering individuals they have never met with the opportunity of a new life and an inheritance of freedom.