My North Korea Talk at GrX

I will be giving a talk to a small group of people at my church, Great Exchange Covenant Church, this Sunday, October 25.  This is the text of what I will be saying.  Please feel free to make suggestions on how I can improve this talk.

Update 10-27-2009: The talk went well.  Though the audience was small, only four people including two other speakers, I still felt privileged having the chance to share.  I enjoyed speaking and I even became emotional when I shared about my son Isaac   Thanks for your encouragement and prayers.

On December 5, 2008, while I was celebrating my birthday in Sunnyvale, Cho Jinhye, a North Korean refugee, gave her testimony at my old church in Boston.  (I blogged about my initial reaction a few days after.)  I want to share some parts of this testimony with you.

My father went on a journey with my mother to China to get some food.  On their way back the North Korean police arrested them.  They tried to force my father to put his fingerprint on a false statement…

Meanwhile, next door my mother was told to put her hands on the ground…  The policeman stepped on her hands with his boots and crushed them.  My father gave in when he heard her screaming in excruciating pain.  He begged them to at least let his wife go since she was 3 months pregnant and there were little children at home with his mother who was 76 years old.

The last thing my mother saw was my father tied to a little stick of a tree covered with blood from the severe beatings.  What should have taken a day on foot took my mother several days to come home for she was barely crawling having been so severely tortured.

In North Korea, 200,000 people are in labor camps that would rival Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s concentration camps.  Torture like what I’ve read is commonplace in testimonies of North Korean refugees.  400,000 people have reportedly died already in these camps.

One day a grandmother Inminbanjang (civilian police) came with a proposition; she would give us 5 Kg of corns if we ran an errand to get some paper for her.  My older sister asked me to take care of my mom and the baby and that she would be back home latest midnight.  She didn’t come back for another week.

Although my mother had just gone through a delivery, she set out to look for my older sister…  (While her mother was gone the baby died.) Three days later my mother came back…  My mother didn’t find my 19-yr-old sister for Chinese men had sold her off.

80% – 90% of North Korean refugee women are trafficked into sexual slavery, forced marriages, etc. This is the highest percentage of any single population in the world.

At 9 PM I set out to escape, piggy backing my 5-year-old brother, holding the hand of my 6-year-old sister .  I had no shoes and wrapped my feet with a plastic bag.  I couldn’t go on because the plastic bag ripped and my feet were hurting too much.  I decided to leave my younger brother with a neighbor.  When I was l leaving, he asked “Why are you leaving me here and taking older sis?”  I told him I would be back in 5 days with some candies…

It was said that my brother had been left outside of the house of the neighbor when their living got tougher.  My brother died from starvation sitting on a rock in the field as he was singing “older sis, when are you coming back…”  I still live with the guilt that I was too weak to take care of him.

In the 1990’s a famine killed approximately two million people or 10% of the population of North Korea.  Starvation and malnutrition still affect many parts of the country.

God places different things on different peoples’ hearts.  And for some reason God has placed North Korea on my heart.  When I hear these testimonies I don’t just hear words, I see faces.  And in this testimony I cried because I saw Victoria when I read about the baby dying and I saw Isaac sitting on the rock calling for Dylan.

What is happening in North Korea right now is probably one of the greatest human rights issues in the world.  I wanted to talk to you about this to raise awareness but also to communicate my hope for what God is doing and will do.

There is a book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years .  It talks about how if we see ourselves as part of a story, a story that has purpose, conflict and character, then our lives can have meaning and direction.

August 4 was one of the more exciting days of my life because on that day Euna Lee and Laura Ling were freed.  What made it exciting was that I, in a very small way, was part of the movement to free them.  I even wrote a letter on my blog to Kim Jong Il asking him to free Euna and Laura.  Though I am sure he did not read it I was part of the story to free them.

One day the walls around North Korea will fall.  Stories will come out and most will be horrific but some will be beautiful.  And I want to be part of that story of freedom for North Korea.  And I’m realizing that I cannot be part of that story alone, that I must be intertwined with other peoples’ stories.

If you interested in having this become part of your story please come talk with me.

(Please note that the black and white photos are from the LiNK 9 Lives Booklet which you can download here.)