Prayer for North Korean Refugees: Sickness

With the ease in dealing with common illness in modern society, struggles to battle everyday sickness in other parts of the world can often be forgotten. As Americans a simple check-up or maybe a drive to the drug store is all we need to deal with the cold or the flu. Medical care is complicated for North Korean refugees. We recently received a report about one of our children in Second Wave whose mother’s ailments include: breast cancer, infectious hepatitis, heart disease, and more.

“Basically nothing is normal,” said our missionaries in the report.

North Koreans in China have a difficult time finding medical care. Hospitals cannot legally give care to North Korean refugees because of their illegal status. If it is illegal for a Chinese citizen to even give a meal to a North Korean, one can only imagine what the consequences would be for a doctor who is caught treating a North Korean refugee.

The lucky few who have found help through foreign aid organizations like Crossing Borders must find care through the doctors who are willing to take a chance (or a bribe) to care for them. There is no shopping around for the best doctor or getting a second opinion.

This is the reality for the many North Korean refugees who come to China for medical care because, believe it or not, the medical care in China is still better than what they have in North Korea, whose system is still stuck in the 1950s. Things were working fine when they were receiving medical supplies from allies like the Soviet Union.

“But by the early 1990s, the deficiencies in the system became more pronounced. Much of the medical equipment was obsolete and broken down, with spare parts impossible to obtain since the factories in the Communist-bloc countries where they were manufactures were by now privatized,” Barbara Demick wrote in her book, “Nothing to Envy.”

The medical system in North Korea by all accounts is still struggling today.

So what does a sick North Korean refugee do? Even as we work to serve them through various means, we at Crossing Borders realize that, currently, there are no perfect, sustainable solutions. It is an ongoing struggle. Please pray for the sick people of North Korea, and the North Korean refugees who desperately need healing care.

Why We Let North Korean Refugees Use Newspaper as Toiletry

The following post was written by a Crossing Borders staff member: It was perhaps one the most meaningful exchanges I’ve had with one of the North Korean refugees in our care. And it was the day that I realized it was okay to let our refugees live in sub-American standards.

I was escorted by our missionaries into Ae-young’s apartment on a dark night. It was in the outskirts of a small city in Northeast China. The roads had no streetlights, the buildings had no power in their stairwells. We used a cell phone to see if we had the right address. Ae-young and her 10-year-old son welcomed us in.

Ae-young is a North Korean refugee. When she crossed the border from North Korea into China, she was sold to a Chinese man and later, with their son, escaped. On her way out she had a chance to grab only one thing: a guitar.With Crossing Borders' support and security, the guitar now hung on the wall of her dim apartment we had relocated her and her son into.

“Do you play?” she asked.

“A little,” I said in broken Korean.

The guitar was dusty. Four of its six strings were intact. The tuning keys creaked as if they had never been turned. I played and the five of us, me, our two missionaries, Ae-young and her son, sang old hymns quietly so we wouldn’t disturb her neighbors. I broke one more string as I played but no one seemed to notice.

After we sang the missionaries and Ae-young spoke while I played with her son. Then I excused myself to the bathroom. I noticed a healthy stack of newspaper within arms reach of the toilet and realized they used this stack of coarse paper to wipe in the bathroom.

When we left I told our missionaries that I wanted to go to the store and get Ae-young and her son some toilet paper. It was a nice gesture, I thought. But our two missionaries, surprisingly, advised against it.

Ae-young was happy with her current situation. She had been provided with this apartment recently. Her new home was an immense upgrade from the conditions she was living in before she had been taken in by Crossing Borders.

Crossing Borders’ goal is not merely to address the living standards of the North Korean refugees we help. Our goal is also not to simply supply refugees with materials we think they need. We try to help them by giving them a safe, clean environment to live in, to meet their needs of food and shelter so that they can figure out what they want to do next. We want to help them to build towards their future independently, responsibly and self-sufficiently. We will guide them to the means to do this whether it is in building a life in China or in taking the steps to flee to South Korea.

I knew this before I had encountered Ae-young and her son but it’s hard to realize that things like nice toilet paper are luxuries. We are used to living with so much that we can forget that our work is not to provide only material happiness.

A lot has been said recently of compassion and the damage organizations like ours can cause in the life of a person with material needs. The perception is that groups like ours come in and take “compassion” on North Korean refugees' standards of living, making them dependent on our aid. In cases this can become a real, detrimental issue. I have seen the damage that money without wisdom and oversight can do in a country that is just beginning to get a taste for Western materialism.

But the injustice in the North Korean refugee crisis isn’t that they can’t afford iPhones, or even toiletries available to modern countries. It is that they have been lied to and spiritually decimated by their government. It is that they have been frozen in fear and made fugitives to victim mentalities.

The goal of Crossing Borders isn’t to bridge the material divide between North Korean refugees and American citizens. We exist because there is a huge injustice in the world and we believe that it is our calling as Christians to go help, to empower them with Christ's compassion.

Prayer for North Korean Refugees: A Homeless People

One of the first North Koreans to come to the U.S. committed suicide in April of 2010. Last year a North Korean refugee and his wife were found dead in their Rochester N.Y. apartment in an apparent murder suicide. Many of the more than 20,000 defectors to make it to South Korea find it hard to adjust to a market-based, modern economy. Such stories might not make sense if you don’t know the context. Why would North Korean refugees who escape from the suffering and poverty of North Korea and China, North Korean refugees who make the dangerous and impossible journey through the modern-day Underground Railroad lose hope once they finally reach their prosperous destination?

I have met North Koreans refugees in China, defectors in South Korea and in the U.S. The story of struggle is almost always the same. They are a people without a nation, a displaced people who cannot find home.

The world they leave behind in North Korea is a place of hunger and oppression. In China they are hunted by the police or captured and trafficked as sex slaves. In South Korea, though they speak the language, they find themselves lost in the frenetic pace of the highly developed country. In the U.S. where only 200 North Koreans have decided to make their home, they are given very little support by the government.

In addition to the adversity of the foreign countries in which they choose to settle, many North Korean refugees long to see their husbands, wives or children who they have left behind, loved ones they may never see again.

As we emerge from our homes this week and live our lives of plenty, let us remember those whose hearts will never be satisfied anywhere except in Jesus Christ. Let us pray for the North Korean refugees whose hearts are yet homeless.

The Problem with Numbers and North Korean Refugees

One of the biggest hurdles in trying to convince people to help North Koreans is that there is so much mystery surrounding North Korea. For all the press on the Great North Korean Famine of the late 1990s, experts still disagree on exactly how many North Koreans died from starvation. In 2001, North Korean foreign minister, Choe Su-hon told UNICEF that 220,000 North Koreans died of starvation between 1995 and 1998.

A 1998 memo to the House International Relations Committee stated that 300,000 to 800,000 North Koreans were dying per year at the famine’s peak.

But there is another phantom statistic that makes it hard for Crossing Borders to promote our work: how many North Korean refugees are there in China? People like solid numbers and the absence of one makes people skeptical that a problem even exists. With an absolute statistic people can assess what exactly needs to be done. They can put a dollar figure next to the issue and throw the appropriate amount f money and resources to experts who work in the field.

In 2003, when Crossing Borders officially started work, most experts estimated that there were between one hundred to three hundred thousand North Koreans hiding in China. A recent study by W. Courtland Robinson from Johns Hopkins University pegged the figure at 10,000.

The only thing we know for sure is that the number is big but that’s the equivalent of going to the international community, spreading our arms as wide as we can and saying, “we need this much help.”

Crossing Borders is among the few organizations that has kept our eye on the situation among North Korean refugees for a prolonged period of time. Though we cannot quantify the problem objectively, we are noticing that the number of North Koreans is decreasing in the area in which we work. In 2004 our wait lists for those who needed support were long and the problem at hand was too big for us to handle. Today North Korean refugees are still plentiful in the area but there is no waiting list.

Despite the absence of a solid figure, we have an amazing amount of anecdotal evidence backed by the testimonies of North Koreans who have defected to the South. We also meticulously vet each person who comes through our doors to get the clearest picture on the refugee crisis and on how we can expand our work. We have people on the field who keep their ears to the ground in refugee communities and underground churches. Thus far all the evidence we have gathered indicates that the great number of North Koreans who need our help throughout China are not going away any time soon.

If only that were enough.

Prayer for North Korean Orphans: Abandonment

Crossing Borders staff and leaders spend a significant part of their time on the field with the refugee children in our Second Wave program. On the surface, the North Korean orphans in our care are adorable. Many of them could simply pass as one of the many Chinese and Korean children who live throughout China. But as our team members have had the opportunity to get to know some of these boys and girls, they have noticed that the differences between the North Korean orphans in China and the other children around them widen from a simple difference of nationality to a great vast gulf of pain and heartache. One of our staff members even described the hearts of the children in our care as "old, deserted houses." A majority of North Korean refugees who cross the border from North Korea and into China are women. Exposed and vulnerable, they are often captured or manipulated into trafficking rings who will sell them into marriages with Chinese men. The gender disparity in China due to the One-Child Policy has given way to a colossal, illegal trade of North Korean refugee women. Children are born into these forced unions.

As North Korean mothers are captured by Chinese authorities or as mothers attempt escape for South Korea, sometimes having no choice but to flee for safety from the police or their own husbands, their children are left behind. This is a case for a most of the refugee children in our program, Second Wave.

One of the children in our care was abandoned the day she received heart surgery. Her mother stole away as her father remained distracted. Another child watched his mother try desperately to wrestle away from the Chinese police as they dragged her away.

Jo Han (12) had a hard time adjusting to his new surroundings in one of Crossing Borders’ group homes. At first his caretaker was unable to handle him because he was always stealing things from other kids at school.

Kleptomania has been a common a symptom of abandonment, according to our field missionaries who are actively involved in the lives of each of our children. The more hurt children are, they say, the more they want to steal. This is a problem for a number of North Korean orphans who we take into our group homes. Some kids search through the garbage for items to take home. Fo others, the deep pain of abandonment comes out when they fight with the other children at home. These fights can turn vicious if nobody is there to stop them.

We encouraged and advised Jo Han’s caretakers as they became a source of love and discipline in his life. With their patient and compassionate efforts, we have seen a dramatic turnaround in his life.

“My parents forsook me but God did not forsake me.  He sent me to [our caretaker] to raise me as a faithful person.  I give thanks to God.  I will praise Him and go to heaven,” wrote Jo Han in his journal.

Whether this was genuine or just to impress his caretakers, we cannot know. But we do know that the stealing has stopped and young Jo Han is behaving much better at home. As we go about our week, let’s remember to pray for Jo Han and the North Korean orphans like him who feel the pain and loneliness of abandonment.

An Inside Look: Our Work with North Korean Refugees

Welcome to the new and improved Crossing Borders website and blog! We are an organization with the mission to share the compassion of Christ with North Korean refugees and their children in China.

It has been over 5 years since we’ve had a blog and for good reason: security.

There is a line we must walk as a missionary organization. We must share stories about the North Korean refugees we encounter and their plight.  Telling stories about the people we help can spread awareness about our mission but in so doing, we can run the risk of compromising the security of the very people we support. Since we’ve been on the mission field now for seven years, we feel like we have developed a firm grasp on what we can and cannot share and the precautions we must take in security.

We understand that we ask of our partner churches, donors and supports for an incredible amount of trust in participating in our work. In order for you to donate to us or even take time to read our emails, tweets and now, blog entries, you must first believe that we do in fact help North Korean refugees in Northeast China. You have to trust that we aren’t just pocketing your money and using it for ourselves.

There is a leap of faith that so many of you make when you write your checks and send them so faithfully to our PO Box.

We believe the trust factor is one reason why so many people don’t support us. If this is you, we hope this blog will help you change your mind.

Although we can never share the names of our refugees, tell you where they live or show their faces, we hope that this blog will give you the information necessary to trust that we are in fact on the difficult mission to restore the lives of North Korean refugees and their children.

We will share stories of our refugees and orphans, give you a behind-the-scenes look at our work, recommend and review books that might help you understand what we’re doing better, and share updates in the world of North Korean refugee work. We will try to pack as much information and news into our posts as possible. We warn you that some of our stories will be heartbreaking, dispiriting, depressing. But we guarantee that there will also be stories of light, joy and hope.

Through it all, we hope that you will be more engaged and motivated to help us share compassion and love to a people in need.