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Two Orphaned NK Children Seek New Families in South By Lee Chi-dong, Korea Times, March 19, 2002 Years of danger and struggles against famine have ended for the 25 North Korean defectors who arrived in Seoul. They will start a new chapter of their lives full of hope, after a three- month adaptation program in a government-provided shelter. But the change might be traumatic for two teenage girls in the group who defected without their parents. The 16-year-olds, identified by the aliases of Kim Hyang and Lee Sun-ae, are orphans. The two have not disclosed their real names to the public since they want to protect their relatives remaining in the North. "We need to give them not only financial but also psychological support,'' said Tim Peters, who is helping children and teenagers who fled to China without their parents. "They are strangers in a strange land, just like they were in China.'' The American missionary founded a charity organization for them 10 years ago, called Helping Hands Korea. He has been shuttling between South Korea and China ever since.
"I think that adoption is an excellent solution,'' he told The Korea Times by phone. "You might remember that many orphaned South Korean children were adopted by Western families after the Korean War. It is time for South Koreans to do the same.'' He also stressed that there is a large number of North Korean orphans in China. "It is difficult to say specifically how many North Korean orphans are staying in China, but most certainly, the number would have to be in the thousands,'' he said. Like most of the orphaned defectors, Kim and Lee crossed the porous border between North Korea and China in search of food, according to an interview with human rights activists in Beijing shortly before storming into the Spanish Embassy last Tuesday. Kim reportedly crossed the frozen Tumen River in the winter of 1999, three years after her parents died of diseases. "I went to the river to find potatoes with my younger brother. While playing on the frozen river, we just decided to cross it,'' Kim was quoted as saying. She supported her brother by working at a restaurant in China for two years, but one day he disappeared. Lee Sun-AE reportedly said that her father is a miner and her mother has been missing since 1997. She initially escaped to China in April of 1999 with her younger brother, but they were sent back by Chinese security officials in January last year. Lee managed to defect to China again by herself the following month. |
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