Winter is not fun for most people, but for many recent defectors it is especially hard having no family to at least warm the soul. Thankfully, however, there are a number of good Samaritans around who are willing to take on the problems of young arrivals as if they were their own.
Choi Gyeong Il of Byucksan Engineering is one such guy. He has become a bit of a go-to for young North Korean students. He tells Daily NK, “From spending time with school-aged youths from North Korea, I couldn’t tell any difference from your average South Korean school student. All they need is to receive ongoing education to keep developing themselves.”
To achieve this, in 2008 Byucksan Engineering began working with the Jayoutuh School, an alternative school for North Korean young people, to provide internships and mentoring programs. It is the only company that specializes in such opportunities for young North Korean at the moment.
As Choi explains, “The internship program was simply developed as a social program to help North Korean university students progress in society, by giving them an opportunity to boost their job prospects and gain some real-life experience.” He continues, “We understood that the most important thing for these kids are the issues they face with education and subsequently in finding work, and when we got to thinking about what we could do best to help them, this is what we came up with.”
The internship program, which runs during semester breaks, has been held seven times since it first began in 2008. So far, 46 North Korean students from 22 different universities have participated in the program.
“Even now I catch up with some of the students; sometimes I help them with their love lives. On other occasions we have introduced them to successful people from various fields,” Choi says. “Sometimes I help them find a doctor when they’re sick, other times I’ve been known to play the role of a father of the bride.” What started as a business opportunity has become an inextricable part of his life.
But it isn’t easy, he says. “When they first arrive here and find themselves in the thick of South Korean society, generally speaking they don’t seem to mix well with South Korean people, and they lack the concept of time which is so important in business here. We’ve had occasions where students have got lost on the way to an interview with us and I’ve had to go out and look for them myself.”
“The most important thing is to play a role in giving them motivation. There needs to be a process that empowers people to charge of their own life and make positive changes,” he explains.
Choi has plenty of experience with young North Korean people, and has cultivated some policy advice for the government, too. He says, “They’re putting in place a social education model; it’s just unfortunate that it’s a one-off sort of thing. The biggest thing we can and should do in preparation for unification is to provide concentrated education and long-term mentoring for them. There is the need to provide tailored education to these kids, either by age group or field of study, to assist them in becoming the leaders that will be responsible for the future of North and South Korea later on.”
This kind of helping hand is not only being extended in the field of education. Hyundai General Hospital in Namyangju is also reaching out to students at Hangyoreh Middle and High School. Kim Bu Seop, CEO of the hospital, say,“I didn’t really know much about the reality of North Korean defectors at first. I found out about the difficulties so many of them go through coming to South Korea from an NGO called ’28 Years 6 Months’. We are operating two buses at the moment that go around every morning providing appropriate treatment to defector patients with tuberculosis and hepatitis.”
“The students have all come from different backgrounds and they spend pretty much all of their time within the confines of school, so it’s not easy for them to get used to being here. They were pretty overawed by South Korean society at first, but they seemed to get used to it after a year or so,” he adds.
Kim agrees that there is much for them to overcome. He says, “They tend to lack an understanding of the education system here, and there is a pretty big gap between their levels of education compared to the kids who have grown up in the viciously competitive environment here, so apart from a few exceptional students, many of them tend to have difficulties getting into university and progressing through society.”
However, “If and when unification happens these kids are going to be playing a role connecting North and South Korea, and because of that I think the government needs to consider what it can do to better assist them settle into life here.”
“A lot of these students have deep physical and emotional scars from making the move to South Korea, kids who lost their parents trying to cross the border or wound up being used by human traffickers in China. Our society needs to be more generous in assisting people who have overcome enormous difficulty just to get here in the first place to rediscover some emotional stability in their lives,” he concludes.
