Seoul Train: The New Underground Railroad

In the stillness of this Holy Saturday, it would be profitable for us to consider the harrowing realities that face the Christians of North Korea, the most closed and oppressive country on earth.

They do exist despite horrific persecution and are the daring center of one of the extraordinary works of mercy in our day: a new Underground Railroad that smuggles desperate refugees from North Korea.

Read this gripping description of the Underground Railroad here. Warning: it is almost unbearable to read in parts. It will haunt you. It should haunt us. Here's a portion:

"He came out of the darkening snow flurries to our rendezvous near a pagoda set in a frozen ornamental pond, a man who was both saviour and fugitive.

Nam Hong-chul, as he called himself, had slipped in to the far northeast Chinese city of Yanji to rescue 11 refugees from North Korea. Now he had to make a plan.
Nam had the classic North Korean looks, aged about 35, with dark wavy hair and high cheekbones. Armed with money, documents, warm clothes and maps, he was trying to save others who, like him, had risked everything to escape starvation and violence under the regime of Kim Jong-il.

“Four of them are living with the pigs,” said Nam, as we made our way to a dingy hotel room to talk. “One of them is going insane. And they are not the worst off. There are others surviving in burrows dug in the ground. “They have crawled through the fields, then waded across the river or walked over the ice when it freezes,” Nam added. “They are desperate.”

Nam is a courier on the “underground railroad” that helps a lucky few North Koreans to sanctuary in Thailand or Mongolia, where they can seek asylum in South Korea.
He muffles his face and hides in the back of a car. Every Chinese checkpoint is a challenge. North Korean agents are out to kill him. Chinese-Korean gangsters hate him for rescuing women doomed to sexual slavery.

Nam made his own escape after his wife and younger son perished in a famine in 1998, only to lose his beloved first son, not yet in his teens, who died on the journey.

A simple man, he found that the Christian faith consoled him in his sorrow. It fired him with zeal to help others in memory of his own boy, who tried to reach freedom but never made it. “Helping other people makes it easier to deal with my grief for my son,” he explained. “I try to get the orphans out first. You will understand why.”

Once again, new Wilberforces have arisen as part of this new abolitionist movement: The Asia edition of Time magazine ran a cover story on Tim Peter's work with Helping Hands Korea. Peters, an American missionary whose wife is Korean, has become the public western face of a daring network of Korean activitists, many of whom are motivated by their Christian faith.

Helping Hands focuses on four primary tasks: 1) food deliveries inside North Korea where reliable monitoring is possible; 2) feeding. clothing, and sheltering some of the 300,000 North Korean refugees in China; 3) establishing and support a large number of secret orphanages for North Korean children in China insuring that they have food, shelter, clothing and access to rudimentary education while in hiding; 4) when all else fails, the underground railroad that smuggles these young refugees out for eventual resettlement in South Korea.

The Times article tells the story of one woman's escape via the Underground. Check out this map which outlines her path to freedom. Meanwhile, Phillip Buck, an evangelical Korean pastor from Seattle, spent 15 months in prison in China for his work with the underground railroad and was only released in August, 2006.

As this BBC report notes: 80 - 90% of those who make it to South Korea turn to Christianity.

"But for 24-year-old Kim Kun Il, the Church is about to become his vocation.

Kim Kun Il, who left the North after his father died from hunger six years ago, is now studying to be a reverend at a missionary school.

He said he goes to church for the mental help, not the material help, the church groups give.

"Money and food has its limitations. Once you are back to a normal state, it doesn't really help," he said.

Douglas Shin agreed. "When you recover from malnutrition or absolute starvation, the human body adapts very quickly. So one or two meals in freedom will be enough to get you on your own feet," he said.

"But it takes a long time and a lot of effort to be revived spiritually. They need some kind of comfort, mental and spiritual."

"This is our role, the Christian role, to save the people from drowning. It's almost like Noah's Ark," he said."

File this under "Who knows but what you were raised up for such a time as this?