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Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.

She was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country’s lore claims its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il, was born.

But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland’s rulers end there.

Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.

The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.

Expert: Malnutrition issue in N. Korea

The power of the Kim dynasty

China cuts ties with North Korean bank

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

U.S. law aimed at helping North Korean orphans

Death by electrocution

Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang’s new leader, Kim Jong Un.

But all this belies a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for homeless orphans.

“There are many children like me who die,” said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.

“Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea.

As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“I thought I would live forever this way,” he said.

How a Camp 14 escapee swayed human rights discourse

Glimpse into the underbelly

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others.

In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012, which instructs the U.S. State Department to “advocate for the best interests of these children” — including helping to reunite families and facilitate adoptions.

The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Gwak Jong-Moon knows the pain orphans suffer. He’s the principal of Hangyeore Middle-High School, a South Korean transitional facility open only to North Korean children and teenagers.

About 50 North Koreans under the age of 24 enter South Korea every year without family, according to the South’s government. These children only make up about 2% of all North Korean defectors who enter the South.

IMPACT YOUR WORLD

How to help:

• World Vision

• UNHCR

• Catholic Relief Services

Some North Korean orphans who survive the treacherous escape from their homeland by way of China end up in South Korean boarding schools, dormitories or group homes.

Adoption in South Korea is not a common practice, but Gwak said “adopting is natural, and worthy.”

“There are some South Koreans who adopt our school’s children, although not many,” he said. “Children here with South Korean adults who don’t officially adopt, but act like their parents make unbelievable progress.”

We recently traveled to Seoul to meet some of these orphans and the people caring for them. Originally we wanted to learn more about their lives in South Korea — what it’s like trying to integrate into an alien society after living in one of the most isolated countries in the world.

We visited Gwak’s school earlier this year — on a majestic campus more fitting for a temple, tucked away in snow-crusted hills about an hour from Seoul. We also visited the Seoul home of a pastor who is raising five North Korean orphans.

In both places, we met children and teenagers scarred by their experiences. Although we could not independently confirm the details of their individual histories, advocates who work with them say they have heard consistently similar testimonies.

We also heard stories of children struggling with South Korean culture, targeted by bullies, befuddled by K-pop and puzzled by mundane tasks like managing money and taking public transportation.

But we also got a glimpse into the underbelly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — from the perspective of those who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society, far removed from the idyllic vision portrayed in the nation’s propaganda.

North Korea: Our global fear and fascination

‘I am going to die’

Not long after running into her mother in the streets, Yoon Hee fell ill. Alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea.

Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move.

Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers.

A voice interrupted her feverish daze.

A villager had appeared. Yoon Hee recognized her as a woman who was struggling to feed her own children.

The villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

Horror, heartbreak in North Korea’s labor camps

Helping defectors escape

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Without parents, family or schooling, they don’t have as much exposure to the state propaganda that is engrained from childhood, according to advocates. When they escape to neighboring China, it is not so much for political reasons, but to find food.

A U.N. assessment in March found that of the country’s estimated 28 million people, 16 million are chronically deprived of food.

Peter Jung is among those working on behalf of North Korea’s orphans. Based in Seoul, he leads Justice for North Korea, which describes itself as a “volunteer, non-partisan, grassroots organization” that opposes human rights violations in North Korea.

Jung first met North Korean orphans in 1998 in northern China, where he had gone to learn Mandarin.

Jung was stunned to see the stunted size and condition of North Korean orphans. “It was too shocking to believe,” Jung said. “There were children who had skin diseases and with bloated stomachs, collapsing in the streets because of malnutrition.”

Korean children have been found to be about 3 to 4 centimeters shorter than their South Korean counterparts, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Nearly 28% of North Korean children suffer from stunting, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Fifteen years after meeting the first of these street orphans, Jung is still helping defectors escape, working from a small, cluttered basement office in the South Korean capital.

‘Hugs and comforts’

For a decade in North Korea, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped.

“I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Sister baffled by North Korea punishment

Why is North Korea cooling it?

China’s influence in the N. Korea crisis

North Korea’s reluctance to talk

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

In Ryanggang province where she lived, the average monthly temperature can fall below freezing during the winter months, according to the World Food Programme.

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

“Sometimes, I wrapped my feet with a plastic bag because it was too cold.”

She slept alone, except for her thoughts of her mother.

“When I almost was starved or freezing to death, the only things I wanted from her were hugs and comforts. I thought that was happiness.”

But she couldn’t recall a single hug from her mother.

Opinion: Why I fled North Korea

Surviving in a new home

Hyuk lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11.

After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of the country.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said.

“The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays.

In the school’s hallways, girls with sleek black hair and boys with long sweeping bangs are busy texting and taking pictures of themselves on their phablets — a combination smartphone and tablet. Their crisply ironed school uniforms would not be out of place at an English or American boarding school.

It’s a vastly different scene than the childhood Hyuk describes. The blur of hunger, cold and countless police beatings has been replaced by soccer and basketball.

The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

The North Korean orphans who escape to South Korea often struggle to catch up in a competitive environment where their counterparts have had years of schooling and private tutoring.

While acknowledging hardships adjusting in South Korea, Hyuk said: “I am very comfortable, because I can openly say anything.”

He’s anxious about what he’ll do after he graduates from the school — maybe he’ll go into operating forklifts, Hyuk said.

A mop of shaggy bangs falls over his round face as Hyuk sits atop a table, his legs swinging freely.

“I can eat, live, and survive here.”

Scars from trauma

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists.

The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. The young boys are sold as sons into Chinese families who have not been able to produce one, said Jung of Justice for North Korea.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

That fear can continue long after escapees have made it to South Korea.

In the home of pastor Daniel Park, we met a 13-year-old boy whose mother took him to China when he was a year old. The mother was caught and repatriated to North Korea, but the boy remained in China, where he was beaten and abused, Park said.

In Park’s Seoul home, the trauma showed. The boy, sporting a buzz cut, was skittish and jumpy around strangers and followed Park closely around the house. During mealtimes, when his foster family would gather to eat, he would take his food and hide in his bedroom and eat alone.

But Park said his habits have since improved.

Escape through China

As Yoon Hee entered adolescence in North Korea, her hopes of reuniting with her mother began to fade.

A few strangers would give money, others would give her food, shoes or clothes after taking pity on her.

“I had hope thinking that there were people out there who were willing to help me,” she said.

Yoon Hee also ran errands for neighbors to earn change.

But in 2009, the North Korean government exchanged its old currency for a new one worth just 1% of its original value. It immediately wiped out people’s savings and triggered chaos as prices for food became unreachable.

“At that time, so many people were dying,” Yoon Hee said. “If I opened my neighbor’s door, people were dead, collapsed on the floor. So many people headed for China, I thought that at least I could survive there.”

There was nothing left for her in North Korea. Her hopes of reuniting with her mother finally faded.

So she made her first escape into China. In the wintertime, the river at the border freezes, paving the way for a quick escape.

In China, she said she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released, she said.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met Daniel Park through underground networks of Christian activists and missionaries

Funded by donors and ministries, the networks employ brokers who help refugees cross into China, bribing and using their connections with officials and border officers.

The networks reach Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, countries near China where the authorities will not repatriate North Koreans. From there, North Koreans try to find their way to a South Korean embassy — where they are sent to Seoul — or they seek refuge in the embassy of other countries like Canada, Britain or the U.S.

Yoon Hee stayed with Park and his family in China’s Zheijiang province, further away from the North Korean border.

“She was bright even though she suffered a lot,” Park said, describing his first impressions of the orphan. “I was able to see her pains. She had gone through so many struggles even though she was very young and sometimes when we would pray for her, she wept.”

By October 2010, Park had arranged for Yoon Hee to fly into South Korea.

‘Part of the family’

In Seoul, Yoon Hee emerges from her bedroom in skinny jeans and a red, puffy vest, her nails painted bright pink. She slouches slightly, perked up by frequent texts on her yellow Samsung phone — which is bigger than her hand.

With wide almond-shaped eyes, spotless porcelain skin and silky black hair, Yoon Hee has the kind of features highly coveted in South Korea, a country obsessed with beauty and youth.

At 19, she could easily be mistaken for a middle school student in Seoul. Yoon Hee stands less than 5 feet tall.

She lives with Park, his wife, their two sons, who are toddlers and four other North Korean children — two boys and two girls.

Their permanent home in Seoul is humble. In the winter, bubble wrap is taped to the windows to keep the house warm.

The walls are scrawled with crayon doodles. Stuffed animals, toy ducks and books rest atop bookshelves and coffee tables. The children crawl over the taupe-colored sofa and scramble onto the living room table.

At times, Yoon Hee talks freely about her life. But there are some questions she’d rather not answer.

She seems more comfortable around the younger children.

And they flock to Yoon Hee as arbiter of all things toddler — toy disputes and snack requests, cries for hugs and sibling rivalries. The other children squeal and scamper around the house, but Yoon Hee rarely raises her voice with them.

“When they make mistakes, I try to show ways to fix their thinking that they can be guided well,” she said, “even though they don’t have their moms.”

Her kinship with the other orphans is forged out of hardship. Park’s two toddler sons look up to her as “unni,” or older sister.

“In this house, she’s a part of us,” Park said. “Part of the family.”

When an older child steals a toy from his younger brother, Yoon Hee scolds him.

“It’s not OK to steal your little brother’s toy,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

But as the older child sulks, Yoon Hee pulls him close and tickles him — giving love and attention that she didn’t have in her childhood.

Two years after her arrival in Seoul, Yoon Hee’s days are busy from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. with studies and a part-time job.

She sleeps on the floor inside a pristine wood-paneled room with a white teddy bear, lying next to the other North Korean girls on pink blankets.

Sometimes, she dreams of her mother even though she hasn’t seen or talked to her in more than a decade.

“I would rather give her love than blame her,” Yoon Hee said, “even though I wasn’t loved.”

In ways, her life has been shaped by her abandonment by those who were supposed to care for her. But Yoon Hee found a new family by abandoning the place that once was home — but ultimately had nothing left to give.

Follow Madison Park on Twitter

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/13/world/asia/north-korea-orphans/index.html?eref=edition

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.

She was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country’s lore claims its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il, was born.

But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland’s rulers end there.

Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.

The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.

Expert: Malnutrition issue in N. Korea

The power of the Kim dynasty

China cuts ties with North Korean bank

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

U.S. law aimed at helping North Korean orphans

Death by electrocution

Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang’s new leader, Kim Jong Un.

But all this belies a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for homeless orphans.

“There are many children like me who die,” said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.

“Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea.

As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“I thought I would live forever this way,” he said.

How a Camp 14 escapee swayed human rights discourse

Glimpse into the underbelly

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others.

In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012, which instructs the U.S. State Department to “advocate for the best interests of these children” — including helping to reunite families and facilitate adoptions.

The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Gwak Jong-Moon knows the pain orphans suffer. He’s the principal of Hangyeore Middle-High School, a South Korean transitional facility open only to North Korean children and teenagers.

About 50 North Koreans under the age of 24 enter South Korea every year without family, according to the South’s government. These children only make up about 2% of all North Korean defectors who enter the South.

IMPACT YOUR WORLD

How to help:

• World Vision

• UNHCR

• Catholic Relief Services

Some North Korean orphans who survive the treacherous escape from their homeland by way of China end up in South Korean boarding schools, dormitories or group homes.

Adoption in South Korea is not a common practice, but Gwak said “adopting is natural, and worthy.”

“There are some South Koreans who adopt our school’s children, although not many,” he said. “Children here with South Korean adults who don’t officially adopt, but act like their parents make unbelievable progress.”

We recently traveled to Seoul to meet some of these orphans and the people caring for them. Originally we wanted to learn more about their lives in South Korea — what it’s like trying to integrate into an alien society after living in one of the most isolated countries in the world.

We visited Gwak’s school earlier this year — on a majestic campus more fitting for a temple, tucked away in snow-crusted hills about an hour from Seoul. We also visited the Seoul home of a pastor who is raising five North Korean orphans.

In both places, we met children and teenagers scarred by their experiences. Although we could not independently confirm the details of their individual histories, advocates who work with them say they have heard consistently similar testimonies.

We also heard stories of children struggling with South Korean culture, targeted by bullies, befuddled by K-pop and puzzled by mundane tasks like managing money and taking public transportation.

But we also got a glimpse into the underbelly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — from the perspective of those who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society, far removed from the idyllic vision portrayed in the nation’s propaganda.

North Korea: Our global fear and fascination

‘I am going to die’

Not long after running into her mother in the streets, Yoon Hee fell ill. Alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea.

Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move.

Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers.

A voice interrupted her feverish daze.

A villager had appeared. Yoon Hee recognized her as a woman who was struggling to feed her own children.

The villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

Horror, heartbreak in North Korea’s labor camps

Helping defectors escape

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Without parents, family or schooling, they don’t have as much exposure to the state propaganda that is engrained from childhood, according to advocates. When they escape to neighboring China, it is not so much for political reasons, but to find food.

A U.N. assessment in March found that of the country’s estimated 28 million people, 16 million are chronically deprived of food.

Peter Jung is among those working on behalf of North Korea’s orphans. Based in Seoul, he leads Justice for North Korea, which describes itself as a “volunteer, non-partisan, grassroots organization” that opposes human rights violations in North Korea.

Jung first met North Korean orphans in 1998 in northern China, where he had gone to learn Mandarin.

Jung was stunned to see the stunted size and condition of North Korean orphans. “It was too shocking to believe,” Jung said. “There were children who had skin diseases and with bloated stomachs, collapsing in the streets because of malnutrition.”

Korean children have been found to be about 3 to 4 centimeters shorter than their South Korean counterparts, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Nearly 28% of North Korean children suffer from stunting, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Fifteen years after meeting the first of these street orphans, Jung is still helping defectors escape, working from a small, cluttered basement office in the South Korean capital.

‘Hugs and comforts’

For a decade in North Korea, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped.

“I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Sister baffled by North Korea punishment

Why is North Korea cooling it?

China’s influence in the N. Korea crisis

North Korea’s reluctance to talk

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

In Ryanggang province where she lived, the average monthly temperature can fall below freezing during the winter months, according to the World Food Programme.

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

“Sometimes, I wrapped my feet with a plastic bag because it was too cold.”

She slept alone, except for her thoughts of her mother.

“When I almost was starved or freezing to death, the only things I wanted from her were hugs and comforts. I thought that was happiness.”

But she couldn’t recall a single hug from her mother.

Opinion: Why I fled North Korea

Surviving in a new home

Hyuk lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11.

After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of the country.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said.

“The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays.

In the school’s hallways, girls with sleek black hair and boys with long sweeping bangs are busy texting and taking pictures of themselves on their phablets — a combination smartphone and tablet. Their crisply ironed school uniforms would not be out of place at an English or American boarding school.

It’s a vastly different scene than the childhood Hyuk describes. The blur of hunger, cold and countless police beatings has been replaced by soccer and basketball.

The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

The North Korean orphans who escape to South Korea often struggle to catch up in a competitive environment where their counterparts have had years of schooling and private tutoring.

While acknowledging hardships adjusting in South Korea, Hyuk said: “I am very comfortable, because I can openly say anything.”

He’s anxious about what he’ll do after he graduates from the school — maybe he’ll go into operating forklifts, Hyuk said.

A mop of shaggy bangs falls over his round face as Hyuk sits atop a table, his legs swinging freely.

“I can eat, live, and survive here.”

Scars from trauma

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists.

The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. The young boys are sold as sons into Chinese families who have not been able to produce one, said Jung of Justice for North Korea.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

That fear can continue long after escapees have made it to South Korea.

In the home of pastor Daniel Park, we met a 13-year-old boy whose mother took him to China when he was a year old. The mother was caught and repatriated to North Korea, but the boy remained in China, where he was beaten and abused, Park said.

In Park’s Seoul home, the trauma showed. The boy, sporting a buzz cut, was skittish and jumpy around strangers and followed Park closely around the house. During mealtimes, when his foster family would gather to eat, he would take his food and hide in his bedroom and eat alone.

But Park said his habits have since improved.

Escape through China

As Yoon Hee entered adolescence in North Korea, her hopes of reuniting with her mother began to fade.

A few strangers would give money, others would give her food, shoes or clothes after taking pity on her.

“I had hope thinking that there were people out there who were willing to help me,” she said.

Yoon Hee also ran errands for neighbors to earn change.

But in 2009, the North Korean government exchanged its old currency for a new one worth just 1% of its original value. It immediately wiped out people’s savings and triggered chaos as prices for food became unreachable.

“At that time, so many people were dying,” Yoon Hee said. “If I opened my neighbor’s door, people were dead, collapsed on the floor. So many people headed for China, I thought that at least I could survive there.”

There was nothing left for her in North Korea. Her hopes of reuniting with her mother finally faded.

So she made her first escape into China. In the wintertime, the river at the border freezes, paving the way for a quick escape.

In China, she said she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released, she said.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met Daniel Park through underground networks of Christian activists and missionaries

Funded by donors and ministries, the networks employ brokers who help refugees cross into China, bribing and using their connections with officials and border officers.

The networks reach Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, countries near China where the authorities will not repatriate North Koreans. From there, North Koreans try to find their way to a South Korean embassy — where they are sent to Seoul — or they seek refuge in the embassy of other countries like Canada, Britain or the U.S.

Yoon Hee stayed with Park and his family in China’s Zheijiang province, further away from the North Korean border.

“She was bright even though she suffered a lot,” Park said, describing his first impressions of the orphan. “I was able to see her pains. She had gone through so many struggles even though she was very young and sometimes when we would pray for her, she wept.”

By October 2010, Park had arranged for Yoon Hee to fly into South Korea.

‘Part of the family’

In Seoul, Yoon Hee emerges from her bedroom in skinny jeans and a red, puffy vest, her nails painted bright pink. She slouches slightly, perked up by frequent texts on her yellow Samsung phone — which is bigger than her hand.

With wide almond-shaped eyes, spotless porcelain skin and silky black hair, Yoon Hee has the kind of features highly coveted in South Korea, a country obsessed with beauty and youth.

At 19, she could easily be mistaken for a middle school student in Seoul. Yoon Hee stands less than 5 feet tall.

She lives with Park, his wife, their two sons, who are toddlers and four other North Korean children — two boys and two girls.

Their permanent home in Seoul is humble. In the winter, bubble wrap is taped to the windows to keep the house warm.

The walls are scrawled with crayon doodles. Stuffed animals, toy ducks and books rest atop bookshelves and coffee tables. The children crawl over the taupe-colored sofa and scramble onto the living room table.

At times, Yoon Hee talks freely about her life. But there are some questions she’d rather not answer.

She seems more comfortable around the younger children.

And they flock to Yoon Hee as arbiter of all things toddler — toy disputes and snack requests, cries for hugs and sibling rivalries. The other children squeal and scamper around the house, but Yoon Hee rarely raises her voice with them.

“When they make mistakes, I try to show ways to fix their thinking that they can be guided well,” she said, “even though they don’t have their moms.”

Her kinship with the other orphans is forged out of hardship. Park’s two toddler sons look up to her as “unni,” or older sister.

“In this house, she’s a part of us,” Park said. “Part of the family.”

When an older child steals a toy from his younger brother, Yoon Hee scolds him.

“It’s not OK to steal your little brother’s toy,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

But as the older child sulks, Yoon Hee pulls him close and tickles him — giving love and attention that she didn’t have in her childhood.

Two years after her arrival in Seoul, Yoon Hee’s days are busy from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. with studies and a part-time job.

She sleeps on the floor inside a pristine wood-paneled room with a white teddy bear, lying next to the other North Korean girls on pink blankets.

Sometimes, she dreams of her mother even though she hasn’t seen or talked to her in more than a decade.

“I would rather give her love than blame her,” Yoon Hee said, “even though I wasn’t loved.”

In ways, her life has been shaped by her abandonment by those who were supposed to care for her. But Yoon Hee found a new family by abandoning the place that once was home — but ultimately had nothing left to give.

Follow Madison Park on Twitter

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/13/world/asia/north-korea-orphans/index.html?eref=edition

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.

She was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country’s lore claims its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il, was born.

But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland’s rulers end there.

Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.

The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.

Expert: Malnutrition issue in N. Korea

The power of the Kim dynasty

China cuts ties with North Korean bank

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

U.S. law aimed at helping North Korean orphans

Death by electrocution

Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang’s new leader, Kim Jong Un.

But all this belies a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for homeless orphans.

“There are many children like me who die,” said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.

“Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea.

As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“I thought I would live forever this way,” he said.

How a Camp 14 escapee swayed human rights discourse

Glimpse into the underbelly

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others.

In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012, which instructs the U.S. State Department to “advocate for the best interests of these children” — including helping to reunite families and facilitate adoptions.

The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Gwak Jong-Moon knows the pain orphans suffer. He’s the principal of Hangyeore Middle-High School, a South Korean transitional facility open only to North Korean children and teenagers.

About 50 North Koreans under the age of 24 enter South Korea every year without family, according to the South’s government. These children only make up about 2% of all North Korean defectors who enter the South.

IMPACT YOUR WORLD

How to help:

• World Vision

• UNHCR

• Catholic Relief Services

Some North Korean orphans who survive the treacherous escape from their homeland by way of China end up in South Korean boarding schools, dormitories or group homes.

Adoption in South Korea is not a common practice, but Gwak said “adopting is natural, and worthy.”

“There are some South Koreans who adopt our school’s children, although not many,” he said. “Children here with South Korean adults who don’t officially adopt, but act like their parents make unbelievable progress.”

We recently traveled to Seoul to meet some of these orphans and the people caring for them. Originally we wanted to learn more about their lives in South Korea — what it’s like trying to integrate into an alien society after living in one of the most isolated countries in the world.

We visited Gwak’s school earlier this year — on a majestic campus more fitting for a temple, tucked away in snow-crusted hills about an hour from Seoul. We also visited the Seoul home of a pastor who is raising five North Korean orphans.

In both places, we met children and teenagers scarred by their experiences. Although we could not independently confirm the details of their individual histories, advocates who work with them say they have heard consistently similar testimonies.

We also heard stories of children struggling with South Korean culture, targeted by bullies, befuddled by K-pop and puzzled by mundane tasks like managing money and taking public transportation.

But we also got a glimpse into the underbelly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — from the perspective of those who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society, far removed from the idyllic vision portrayed in the nation’s propaganda.

North Korea: Our global fear and fascination

‘I am going to die’

Not long after running into her mother in the streets, Yoon Hee fell ill. Alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea.

Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move.

Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers.

A voice interrupted her feverish daze.

A villager had appeared. Yoon Hee recognized her as a woman who was struggling to feed her own children.

The villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

Horror, heartbreak in North Korea’s labor camps

Helping defectors escape

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Without parents, family or schooling, they don’t have as much exposure to the state propaganda that is engrained from childhood, according to advocates. When they escape to neighboring China, it is not so much for political reasons, but to find food.

A U.N. assessment in March found that of the country’s estimated 28 million people, 16 million are chronically deprived of food.

Peter Jung is among those working on behalf of North Korea’s orphans. Based in Seoul, he leads Justice for North Korea, which describes itself as a “volunteer, non-partisan, grassroots organization” that opposes human rights violations in North Korea.

Jung first met North Korean orphans in 1998 in northern China, where he had gone to learn Mandarin.

Jung was stunned to see the stunted size and condition of North Korean orphans. “It was too shocking to believe,” Jung said. “There were children who had skin diseases and with bloated stomachs, collapsing in the streets because of malnutrition.”

Korean children have been found to be about 3 to 4 centimeters shorter than their South Korean counterparts, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Nearly 28% of North Korean children suffer from stunting, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Fifteen years after meeting the first of these street orphans, Jung is still helping defectors escape, working from a small, cluttered basement office in the South Korean capital.

‘Hugs and comforts’

For a decade in North Korea, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped.

“I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Sister baffled by North Korea punishment

Why is North Korea cooling it?

China’s influence in the N. Korea crisis

North Korea’s reluctance to talk

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

In Ryanggang province where she lived, the average monthly temperature can fall below freezing during the winter months, according to the World Food Programme.

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

“Sometimes, I wrapped my feet with a plastic bag because it was too cold.”

She slept alone, except for her thoughts of her mother.

“When I almost was starved or freezing to death, the only things I wanted from her were hugs and comforts. I thought that was happiness.”

But she couldn’t recall a single hug from her mother.

Opinion: Why I fled North Korea

Surviving in a new home

Hyuk lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11.

After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of the country.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said.

“The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays.

In the school’s hallways, girls with sleek black hair and boys with long sweeping bangs are busy texting and taking pictures of themselves on their phablets — a combination smartphone and tablet. Their crisply ironed school uniforms would not be out of place at an English or American boarding school.

It’s a vastly different scene than the childhood Hyuk describes. The blur of hunger, cold and countless police beatings has been replaced by soccer and basketball.

The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

The North Korean orphans who escape to South Korea often struggle to catch up in a competitive environment where their counterparts have had years of schooling and private tutoring.

While acknowledging hardships adjusting in South Korea, Hyuk said: “I am very comfortable, because I can openly say anything.”

He’s anxious about what he’ll do after he graduates from the school — maybe he’ll go into operating forklifts, Hyuk said.

A mop of shaggy bangs falls over his round face as Hyuk sits atop a table, his legs swinging freely.

“I can eat, live, and survive here.”

Scars from trauma

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists.

The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. The young boys are sold as sons into Chinese families who have not been able to produce one, said Jung of Justice for North Korea.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

That fear can continue long after escapees have made it to South Korea.

In the home of pastor Daniel Park, we met a 13-year-old boy whose mother took him to China when he was a year old. The mother was caught and repatriated to North Korea, but the boy remained in China, where he was beaten and abused, Park said.

In Park’s Seoul home, the trauma showed. The boy, sporting a buzz cut, was skittish and jumpy around strangers and followed Park closely around the house. During mealtimes, when his foster family would gather to eat, he would take his food and hide in his bedroom and eat alone.

But Park said his habits have since improved.

Escape through China

As Yoon Hee entered adolescence in North Korea, her hopes of reuniting with her mother began to fade.

A few strangers would give money, others would give her food, shoes or clothes after taking pity on her.

“I had hope thinking that there were people out there who were willing to help me,” she said.

Yoon Hee also ran errands for neighbors to earn change.

But in 2009, the North Korean government exchanged its old currency for a new one worth just 1% of its original value. It immediately wiped out people’s savings and triggered chaos as prices for food became unreachable.

“At that time, so many people were dying,” Yoon Hee said. “If I opened my neighbor’s door, people were dead, collapsed on the floor. So many people headed for China, I thought that at least I could survive there.”

There was nothing left for her in North Korea. Her hopes of reuniting with her mother finally faded.

So she made her first escape into China. In the wintertime, the river at the border freezes, paving the way for a quick escape.

In China, she said she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released, she said.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met Daniel Park through underground networks of Christian activists and missionaries

Funded by donors and ministries, the networks employ brokers who help refugees cross into China, bribing and using their connections with officials and border officers.

The networks reach Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, countries near China where the authorities will not repatriate North Koreans. From there, North Koreans try to find their way to a South Korean embassy — where they are sent to Seoul — or they seek refuge in the embassy of other countries like Canada, Britain or the U.S.

Yoon Hee stayed with Park and his family in China’s Zheijiang province, further away from the North Korean border.

“She was bright even though she suffered a lot,” Park said, describing his first impressions of the orphan. “I was able to see her pains. She had gone through so many struggles even though she was very young and sometimes when we would pray for her, she wept.”

By October 2010, Park had arranged for Yoon Hee to fly into South Korea.

‘Part of the family’

In Seoul, Yoon Hee emerges from her bedroom in skinny jeans and a red, puffy vest, her nails painted bright pink. She slouches slightly, perked up by frequent texts on her yellow Samsung phone — which is bigger than her hand.

With wide almond-shaped eyes, spotless porcelain skin and silky black hair, Yoon Hee has the kind of features highly coveted in South Korea, a country obsessed with beauty and youth.

At 19, she could easily be mistaken for a middle school student in Seoul. Yoon Hee stands less than 5 feet tall.

She lives with Park, his wife, their two sons, who are toddlers and four other North Korean children — two boys and two girls.

Their permanent home in Seoul is humble. In the winter, bubble wrap is taped to the windows to keep the house warm.

The walls are scrawled with crayon doodles. Stuffed animals, toy ducks and books rest atop bookshelves and coffee tables. The children crawl over the taupe-colored sofa and scramble onto the living room table.

At times, Yoon Hee talks freely about her life. But there are some questions she’d rather not answer.

She seems more comfortable around the younger children.

And they flock to Yoon Hee as arbiter of all things toddler — toy disputes and snack requests, cries for hugs and sibling rivalries. The other children squeal and scamper around the house, but Yoon Hee rarely raises her voice with them.

“When they make mistakes, I try to show ways to fix their thinking that they can be guided well,” she said, “even though they don’t have their moms.”

Her kinship with the other orphans is forged out of hardship. Park’s two toddler sons look up to her as “unni,” or older sister.

“In this house, she’s a part of us,” Park said. “Part of the family.”

When an older child steals a toy from his younger brother, Yoon Hee scolds him.

“It’s not OK to steal your little brother’s toy,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

But as the older child sulks, Yoon Hee pulls him close and tickles him — giving love and attention that she didn’t have in her childhood.

Two years after her arrival in Seoul, Yoon Hee’s days are busy from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. with studies and a part-time job.

She sleeps on the floor inside a pristine wood-paneled room with a white teddy bear, lying next to the other North Korean girls on pink blankets.

Sometimes, she dreams of her mother even though she hasn’t seen or talked to her in more than a decade.

“I would rather give her love than blame her,” Yoon Hee said, “even though I wasn’t loved.”

In ways, her life has been shaped by her abandonment by those who were supposed to care for her. But Yoon Hee found a new family by abandoning the place that once was home — but ultimately had nothing left to give.

Follow Madison Park on Twitter

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/13/world/asia/north-korea-orphans/index.html?eref=edition

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.

She was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country’s lore claims its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il, was born.

But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland’s rulers end there.

Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.

The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.

Expert: Malnutrition issue in N. Korea

The power of the Kim dynasty

China cuts ties with North Korean bank

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

U.S. law aimed at helping North Korean orphans

Death by electrocution

Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang’s new leader, Kim Jong Un.

But all this belies a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for homeless orphans.

“There are many children like me who die,” said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.

“Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea.

As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“I thought I would live forever this way,” he said.

How a Camp 14 escapee swayed human rights discourse

Glimpse into the underbelly

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others.

In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012, which instructs the U.S. State Department to “advocate for the best interests of these children” — including helping to reunite families and facilitate adoptions.

The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Gwak Jong-Moon knows the pain orphans suffer. He’s the principal of Hangyeore Middle-High School, a South Korean transitional facility open only to North Korean children and teenagers.

About 50 North Koreans under the age of 24 enter South Korea every year without family, according to the South’s government. These children only make up about 2% of all North Korean defectors who enter the South.

IMPACT YOUR WORLD

How to help:

• World Vision

• UNHCR

• Catholic Relief Services

Some North Korean orphans who survive the treacherous escape from their homeland by way of China end up in South Korean boarding schools, dormitories or group homes.

Adoption in South Korea is not a common practice, but Gwak said “adopting is natural, and worthy.”

“There are some South Koreans who adopt our school’s children, although not many,” he said. “Children here with South Korean adults who don’t officially adopt, but act like their parents make unbelievable progress.”

We recently traveled to Seoul to meet some of these orphans and the people caring for them. Originally we wanted to learn more about their lives in South Korea — what it’s like trying to integrate into an alien society after living in one of the most isolated countries in the world.

We visited Gwak’s school earlier this year — on a majestic campus more fitting for a temple, tucked away in snow-crusted hills about an hour from Seoul. We also visited the Seoul home of a pastor who is raising five North Korean orphans.

In both places, we met children and teenagers scarred by their experiences. Although we could not independently confirm the details of their individual histories, advocates who work with them say they have heard consistently similar testimonies.

We also heard stories of children struggling with South Korean culture, targeted by bullies, befuddled by K-pop and puzzled by mundane tasks like managing money and taking public transportation.

But we also got a glimpse into the underbelly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — from the perspective of those who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society, far removed from the idyllic vision portrayed in the nation’s propaganda.

North Korea: Our global fear and fascination

‘I am going to die’

Not long after running into her mother in the streets, Yoon Hee fell ill. Alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea.

Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move.

Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers.

A voice interrupted her feverish daze.

A villager had appeared. Yoon Hee recognized her as a woman who was struggling to feed her own children.

The villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

Horror, heartbreak in North Korea’s labor camps

Helping defectors escape

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Without parents, family or schooling, they don’t have as much exposure to the state propaganda that is engrained from childhood, according to advocates. When they escape to neighboring China, it is not so much for political reasons, but to find food.

A U.N. assessment in March found that of the country’s estimated 28 million people, 16 million are chronically deprived of food.

Peter Jung is among those working on behalf of North Korea’s orphans. Based in Seoul, he leads Justice for North Korea, which describes itself as a “volunteer, non-partisan, grassroots organization” that opposes human rights violations in North Korea.

Jung first met North Korean orphans in 1998 in northern China, where he had gone to learn Mandarin.

Jung was stunned to see the stunted size and condition of North Korean orphans. “It was too shocking to believe,” Jung said. “There were children who had skin diseases and with bloated stomachs, collapsing in the streets because of malnutrition.”

Korean children have been found to be about 3 to 4 centimeters shorter than their South Korean counterparts, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Nearly 28% of North Korean children suffer from stunting, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Fifteen years after meeting the first of these street orphans, Jung is still helping defectors escape, working from a small, cluttered basement office in the South Korean capital.

‘Hugs and comforts’

For a decade in North Korea, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped.

“I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Sister baffled by North Korea punishment

Why is North Korea cooling it?

China’s influence in the N. Korea crisis

North Korea’s reluctance to talk

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

In Ryanggang province where she lived, the average monthly temperature can fall below freezing during the winter months, according to the World Food Programme.

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

“Sometimes, I wrapped my feet with a plastic bag because it was too cold.”

She slept alone, except for her thoughts of her mother.

“When I almost was starved or freezing to death, the only things I wanted from her were hugs and comforts. I thought that was happiness.”

But she couldn’t recall a single hug from her mother.

Opinion: Why I fled North Korea

Surviving in a new home

Hyuk lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11.

After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of the country.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said.

“The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays.

In the school’s hallways, girls with sleek black hair and boys with long sweeping bangs are busy texting and taking pictures of themselves on their phablets — a combination smartphone and tablet. Their crisply ironed school uniforms would not be out of place at an English or American boarding school.

It’s a vastly different scene than the childhood Hyuk describes. The blur of hunger, cold and countless police beatings has been replaced by soccer and basketball.

The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

The North Korean orphans who escape to South Korea often struggle to catch up in a competitive environment where their counterparts have had years of schooling and private tutoring.

While acknowledging hardships adjusting in South Korea, Hyuk said: “I am very comfortable, because I can openly say anything.”

He’s anxious about what he’ll do after he graduates from the school — maybe he’ll go into operating forklifts, Hyuk said.

A mop of shaggy bangs falls over his round face as Hyuk sits atop a table, his legs swinging freely.

“I can eat, live, and survive here.”

Scars from trauma

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists.

The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. The young boys are sold as sons into Chinese families who have not been able to produce one, said Jung of Justice for North Korea.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

That fear can continue long after escapees have made it to South Korea.

In the home of pastor Daniel Park, we met a 13-year-old boy whose mother took him to China when he was a year old. The mother was caught and repatriated to North Korea, but the boy remained in China, where he was beaten and abused, Park said.

In Park’s Seoul home, the trauma showed. The boy, sporting a buzz cut, was skittish and jumpy around strangers and followed Park closely around the house. During mealtimes, when his foster family would gather to eat, he would take his food and hide in his bedroom and eat alone.

But Park said his habits have since improved.

Escape through China

As Yoon Hee entered adolescence in North Korea, her hopes of reuniting with her mother began to fade.

A few strangers would give money, others would give her food, shoes or clothes after taking pity on her.

“I had hope thinking that there were people out there who were willing to help me,” she said.

Yoon Hee also ran errands for neighbors to earn change.

But in 2009, the North Korean government exchanged its old currency for a new one worth just 1% of its original value. It immediately wiped out people’s savings and triggered chaos as prices for food became unreachable.

“At that time, so many people were dying,” Yoon Hee said. “If I opened my neighbor’s door, people were dead, collapsed on the floor. So many people headed for China, I thought that at least I could survive there.”

There was nothing left for her in North Korea. Her hopes of reuniting with her mother finally faded.

So she made her first escape into China. In the wintertime, the river at the border freezes, paving the way for a quick escape.

In China, she said she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released, she said.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met Daniel Park through underground networks of Christian activists and missionaries

Funded by donors and ministries, the networks employ brokers who help refugees cross into China, bribing and using their connections with officials and border officers.

The networks reach Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, countries near China where the authorities will not repatriate North Koreans. From there, North Koreans try to find their way to a South Korean embassy — where they are sent to Seoul — or they seek refuge in the embassy of other countries like Canada, Britain or the U.S.

Yoon Hee stayed with Park and his family in China’s Zheijiang province, further away from the North Korean border.

“She was bright even though she suffered a lot,” Park said, describing his first impressions of the orphan. “I was able to see her pains. She had gone through so many struggles even though she was very young and sometimes when we would pray for her, she wept.”

By October 2010, Park had arranged for Yoon Hee to fly into South Korea.

‘Part of the family’

In Seoul, Yoon Hee emerges from her bedroom in skinny jeans and a red, puffy vest, her nails painted bright pink. She slouches slightly, perked up by frequent texts on her yellow Samsung phone — which is bigger than her hand.

With wide almond-shaped eyes, spotless porcelain skin and silky black hair, Yoon Hee has the kind of features highly coveted in South Korea, a country obsessed with beauty and youth.

At 19, she could easily be mistaken for a middle school student in Seoul. Yoon Hee stands less than 5 feet tall.

She lives with Park, his wife, their two sons, who are toddlers and four other North Korean children — two boys and two girls.

Their permanent home in Seoul is humble. In the winter, bubble wrap is taped to the windows to keep the house warm.

The walls are scrawled with crayon doodles. Stuffed animals, toy ducks and books rest atop bookshelves and coffee tables. The children crawl over the taupe-colored sofa and scramble onto the living room table.

At times, Yoon Hee talks freely about her life. But there are some questions she’d rather not answer.

She seems more comfortable around the younger children.

And they flock to Yoon Hee as arbiter of all things toddler — toy disputes and snack requests, cries for hugs and sibling rivalries. The other children squeal and scamper around the house, but Yoon Hee rarely raises her voice with them.

“When they make mistakes, I try to show ways to fix their thinking that they can be guided well,” she said, “even though they don’t have their moms.”

Her kinship with the other orphans is forged out of hardship. Park’s two toddler sons look up to her as “unni,” or older sister.

“In this house, she’s a part of us,” Park said. “Part of the family.”

When an older child steals a toy from his younger brother, Yoon Hee scolds him.

“It’s not OK to steal your little brother’s toy,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

But as the older child sulks, Yoon Hee pulls him close and tickles him — giving love and attention that she didn’t have in her childhood.

Two years after her arrival in Seoul, Yoon Hee’s days are busy from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. with studies and a part-time job.

She sleeps on the floor inside a pristine wood-paneled room with a white teddy bear, lying next to the other North Korean girls on pink blankets.

Sometimes, she dreams of her mother even though she hasn’t seen or talked to her in more than a decade.

“I would rather give her love than blame her,” Yoon Hee said, “even though I wasn’t loved.”

In ways, her life has been shaped by her abandonment by those who were supposed to care for her. But Yoon Hee found a new family by abandoning the place that once was home — but ultimately had nothing left to give.

Follow Madison Park on Twitter

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/13/world/asia/north-korea-orphans/index.html?eref=edition

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.

She was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country’s lore claims its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il, was born.

But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland’s rulers end there.

Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.

The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.

Expert: Malnutrition issue in N. Korea

The power of the Kim dynasty

China cuts ties with North Korean bank

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

U.S. law aimed at helping North Korean orphans

Death by electrocution

Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang’s new leader, Kim Jong Un.

But all this belies a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for homeless orphans.

“There are many children like me who die,” said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.

“Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea.

As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“I thought I would live forever this way,” he said.

How a Camp 14 escapee swayed human rights discourse

Glimpse into the underbelly

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others.

In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012, which instructs the U.S. State Department to “advocate for the best interests of these children” — including helping to reunite families and facilitate adoptions.

The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Gwak Jong-Moon knows the pain orphans suffer. He’s the principal of Hangyeore Middle-High School, a South Korean transitional facility open only to North Korean children and teenagers.

About 50 North Koreans under the age of 24 enter South Korea every year without family, according to the South’s government. These children only make up about 2% of all North Korean defectors who enter the South.

IMPACT YOUR WORLD

How to help:

• World Vision

• UNHCR

• Catholic Relief Services

Some North Korean orphans who survive the treacherous escape from their homeland by way of China end up in South Korean boarding schools, dormitories or group homes.

Adoption in South Korea is not a common practice, but Gwak said “adopting is natural, and worthy.”

“There are some South Koreans who adopt our school’s children, although not many,” he said. “Children here with South Korean adults who don’t officially adopt, but act like their parents make unbelievable progress.”

We recently traveled to Seoul to meet some of these orphans and the people caring for them. Originally we wanted to learn more about their lives in South Korea — what it’s like trying to integrate into an alien society after living in one of the most isolated countries in the world.

We visited Gwak’s school earlier this year — on a majestic campus more fitting for a temple, tucked away in snow-crusted hills about an hour from Seoul. We also visited the Seoul home of a pastor who is raising five North Korean orphans.

In both places, we met children and teenagers scarred by their experiences. Although we could not independently confirm the details of their individual histories, advocates who work with them say they have heard consistently similar testimonies.

We also heard stories of children struggling with South Korean culture, targeted by bullies, befuddled by K-pop and puzzled by mundane tasks like managing money and taking public transportation.

But we also got a glimpse into the underbelly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — from the perspective of those who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society, far removed from the idyllic vision portrayed in the nation’s propaganda.

North Korea: Our global fear and fascination

‘I am going to die’

Not long after running into her mother in the streets, Yoon Hee fell ill. Alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea.

Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move.

Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers.

A voice interrupted her feverish daze.

A villager had appeared. Yoon Hee recognized her as a woman who was struggling to feed her own children.

The villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

Horror, heartbreak in North Korea’s labor camps

Helping defectors escape

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Without parents, family or schooling, they don’t have as much exposure to the state propaganda that is engrained from childhood, according to advocates. When they escape to neighboring China, it is not so much for political reasons, but to find food.

A U.N. assessment in March found that of the country’s estimated 28 million people, 16 million are chronically deprived of food.

Peter Jung is among those working on behalf of North Korea’s orphans. Based in Seoul, he leads Justice for North Korea, which describes itself as a “volunteer, non-partisan, grassroots organization” that opposes human rights violations in North Korea.

Jung first met North Korean orphans in 1998 in northern China, where he had gone to learn Mandarin.

Jung was stunned to see the stunted size and condition of North Korean orphans. “It was too shocking to believe,” Jung said. “There were children who had skin diseases and with bloated stomachs, collapsing in the streets because of malnutrition.”

Korean children have been found to be about 3 to 4 centimeters shorter than their South Korean counterparts, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Nearly 28% of North Korean children suffer from stunting, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Fifteen years after meeting the first of these street orphans, Jung is still helping defectors escape, working from a small, cluttered basement office in the South Korean capital.

‘Hugs and comforts’

For a decade in North Korea, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped.

“I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Sister baffled by North Korea punishment

Why is North Korea cooling it?

China’s influence in the N. Korea crisis

North Korea’s reluctance to talk

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

In Ryanggang province where she lived, the average monthly temperature can fall below freezing during the winter months, according to the World Food Programme.

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

“Sometimes, I wrapped my feet with a plastic bag because it was too cold.”

She slept alone, except for her thoughts of her mother.

“When I almost was starved or freezing to death, the only things I wanted from her were hugs and comforts. I thought that was happiness.”

But she couldn’t recall a single hug from her mother.

Opinion: Why I fled North Korea

Surviving in a new home

Hyuk lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11.

After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of the country.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said.

“The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays.

In the school’s hallways, girls with sleek black hair and boys with long sweeping bangs are busy texting and taking pictures of themselves on their phablets — a combination smartphone and tablet. Their crisply ironed school uniforms would not be out of place at an English or American boarding school.

It’s a vastly different scene than the childhood Hyuk describes. The blur of hunger, cold and countless police beatings has been replaced by soccer and basketball.

The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

The North Korean orphans who escape to South Korea often struggle to catch up in a competitive environment where their counterparts have had years of schooling and private tutoring.

While acknowledging hardships adjusting in South Korea, Hyuk said: “I am very comfortable, because I can openly say anything.”

He’s anxious about what he’ll do after he graduates from the school — maybe he’ll go into operating forklifts, Hyuk said.

A mop of shaggy bangs falls over his round face as Hyuk sits atop a table, his legs swinging freely.

“I can eat, live, and survive here.”

Scars from trauma

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists.

The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. The young boys are sold as sons into Chinese families who have not been able to produce one, said Jung of Justice for North Korea.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

That fear can continue long after escapees have made it to South Korea.

In the home of pastor Daniel Park, we met a 13-year-old boy whose mother took him to China when he was a year old. The mother was caught and repatriated to North Korea, but the boy remained in China, where he was beaten and abused, Park said.

In Park’s Seoul home, the trauma showed. The boy, sporting a buzz cut, was skittish and jumpy around strangers and followed Park closely around the house. During mealtimes, when his foster family would gather to eat, he would take his food and hide in his bedroom and eat alone.

But Park said his habits have since improved.

Escape through China

As Yoon Hee entered adolescence in North Korea, her hopes of reuniting with her mother began to fade.

A few strangers would give money, others would give her food, shoes or clothes after taking pity on her.

“I had hope thinking that there were people out there who were willing to help me,” she said.

Yoon Hee also ran errands for neighbors to earn change.

But in 2009, the North Korean government exchanged its old currency for a new one worth just 1% of its original value. It immediately wiped out people’s savings and triggered chaos as prices for food became unreachable.

“At that time, so many people were dying,” Yoon Hee said. “If I opened my neighbor’s door, people were dead, collapsed on the floor. So many people headed for China, I thought that at least I could survive there.”

There was nothing left for her in North Korea. Her hopes of reuniting with her mother finally faded.

So she made her first escape into China. In the wintertime, the river at the border freezes, paving the way for a quick escape.

In China, she said she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released, she said.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met Daniel Park through underground networks of Christian activists and missionaries

Funded by donors and ministries, the networks employ brokers who help refugees cross into China, bribing and using their connections with officials and border officers.

The networks reach Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, countries near China where the authorities will not repatriate North Koreans. From there, North Koreans try to find their way to a South Korean embassy — where they are sent to Seoul — or they seek refuge in the embassy of other countries like Canada, Britain or the U.S.

Yoon Hee stayed with Park and his family in China’s Zheijiang province, further away from the North Korean border.

“She was bright even though she suffered a lot,” Park said, describing his first impressions of the orphan. “I was able to see her pains. She had gone through so many struggles even though she was very young and sometimes when we would pray for her, she wept.”

By October 2010, Park had arranged for Yoon Hee to fly into South Korea.

‘Part of the family’

In Seoul, Yoon Hee emerges from her bedroom in skinny jeans and a red, puffy vest, her nails painted bright pink. She slouches slightly, perked up by frequent texts on her yellow Samsung phone — which is bigger than her hand.

With wide almond-shaped eyes, spotless porcelain skin and silky black hair, Yoon Hee has the kind of features highly coveted in South Korea, a country obsessed with beauty and youth.

At 19, she could easily be mistaken for a middle school student in Seoul. Yoon Hee stands less than 5 feet tall.

She lives with Park, his wife, their two sons, who are toddlers and four other North Korean children — two boys and two girls.

Their permanent home in Seoul is humble. In the winter, bubble wrap is taped to the windows to keep the house warm.

The walls are scrawled with crayon doodles. Stuffed animals, toy ducks and books rest atop bookshelves and coffee tables. The children crawl over the taupe-colored sofa and scramble onto the living room table.

At times, Yoon Hee talks freely about her life. But there are some questions she’d rather not answer.

She seems more comfortable around the younger children.

And they flock to Yoon Hee as arbiter of all things toddler — toy disputes and snack requests, cries for hugs and sibling rivalries. The other children squeal and scamper around the house, but Yoon Hee rarely raises her voice with them.

“When they make mistakes, I try to show ways to fix their thinking that they can be guided well,” she said, “even though they don’t have their moms.”

Her kinship with the other orphans is forged out of hardship. Park’s two toddler sons look up to her as “unni,” or older sister.

“In this house, she’s a part of us,” Park said. “Part of the family.”

When an older child steals a toy from his younger brother, Yoon Hee scolds him.

“It’s not OK to steal your little brother’s toy,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

But as the older child sulks, Yoon Hee pulls him close and tickles him — giving love and attention that she didn’t have in her childhood.

Two years after her arrival in Seoul, Yoon Hee’s days are busy from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. with studies and a part-time job.

She sleeps on the floor inside a pristine wood-paneled room with a white teddy bear, lying next to the other North Korean girls on pink blankets.

Sometimes, she dreams of her mother even though she hasn’t seen or talked to her in more than a decade.

“I would rather give her love than blame her,” Yoon Hee said, “even though I wasn’t loved.”

In ways, her life has been shaped by her abandonment by those who were supposed to care for her. But Yoon Hee found a new family by abandoning the place that once was home — but ultimately had nothing left to give.

Follow Madison Park on Twitter

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/13/world/asia/north-korea-orphans/index.html?eref=edition

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.

She was born in a village near North Korea’s sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country’s lore claims its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest son, Kim Jong Il, was born.

But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland’s rulers end there.

Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.

The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.

Expert: Malnutrition issue in N. Korea

The power of the Kim dynasty

China cuts ties with North Korean bank

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. “She never came back,” Yoon Hee said.

Yoon Hee had no choice but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North Korean children do — living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.

Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.

“I sometimes ran into her on the streets,” Yoon Hee said, “but I couldn’t ever get a warm feeling from her.”

One time when they met, Yoon Hee said, “she told me she was already having a hard time living by herself, so she couldn’t live with me.”

But Yoon Hee was undeterred.

“I had a hope.”

U.S. law aimed at helping North Korean orphans

Death by electrocution

Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang’s new leader, Kim Jong Un.

But all this belies a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for homeless orphans.

“There are many children like me who die,” said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a decade after becoming an orphan.

In the punishing winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to sleep.

“Many children accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,” said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of family members still in North Korea.

As Hyuk dozed off each night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as possible — willing himself not to move in his sleep.

“I thought I would live forever this way,” he said.

How a Camp 14 escapee swayed human rights discourse

Glimpse into the underbelly

The plight of orphans who’ve escaped North Korea caught the attention of U.S. humanitarian groups, who’ve lobbied for years to pave the way for their adoption by Americans and others.

In January, President Obama signed the North Korean Child Welfare Act of 2012, which instructs the U.S. State Department to “advocate for the best interests of these children” — including helping to reunite families and facilitate adoptions.

The law is aimed primarily at those orphans hiding in China and other countries. Those who make it to South Korea are provided an education, a path to citizenship and even a chance at adoption.

Gwak Jong-Moon knows the pain orphans suffer. He’s the principal of Hangyeore Middle-High School, a South Korean transitional facility open only to North Korean children and teenagers.

About 50 North Koreans under the age of 24 enter South Korea every year without family, according to the South’s government. These children only make up about 2% of all North Korean defectors who enter the South.

IMPACT YOUR WORLD

How to help:

• World Vision

• UNHCR

• Catholic Relief Services

Some North Korean orphans who survive the treacherous escape from their homeland by way of China end up in South Korean boarding schools, dormitories or group homes.

Adoption in South Korea is not a common practice, but Gwak said “adopting is natural, and worthy.”

“There are some South Koreans who adopt our school’s children, although not many,” he said. “Children here with South Korean adults who don’t officially adopt, but act like their parents make unbelievable progress.”

We recently traveled to Seoul to meet some of these orphans and the people caring for them. Originally we wanted to learn more about their lives in South Korea — what it’s like trying to integrate into an alien society after living in one of the most isolated countries in the world.

We visited Gwak’s school earlier this year — on a majestic campus more fitting for a temple, tucked away in snow-crusted hills about an hour from Seoul. We also visited the Seoul home of a pastor who is raising five North Korean orphans.

In both places, we met children and teenagers scarred by their experiences. Although we could not independently confirm the details of their individual histories, advocates who work with them say they have heard consistently similar testimonies.

We also heard stories of children struggling with South Korean culture, targeted by bullies, befuddled by K-pop and puzzled by mundane tasks like managing money and taking public transportation.

But we also got a glimpse into the underbelly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — from the perspective of those who occupied one of the lowest rungs of society, far removed from the idyllic vision portrayed in the nation’s propaganda.

North Korea: Our global fear and fascination

‘I am going to die’

Not long after running into her mother in the streets, Yoon Hee fell ill. Alone and 10 years old, she lay in the snow as the icy winter descended in North Korea.

Eventually, Yoon Hee caught what she suspects was typhoid, leaving her in a hell of fire and ice. Although she lay in the snow about two weeks, no one offered help or food.

She tried to muster her energy to sit and wiggle her fingers and toes, but her hands and feet barely budged — they were frozen in place. She could no longer move.

Surely, this was it, Yoon Hee thought. She prepared herself. “I am going to die.”

Yoon Hee would become yet another corpse rotting in the street — she had seen the frozen corpses on the roadside because no one bothered to bury bodies of strangers.

A voice interrupted her feverish daze.

A villager had appeared. Yoon Hee recognized her as a woman who was struggling to feed her own children.

The villager thrust money into Yoon Hee’s hand. Her voice was firm: “You have to survive.”

Horror, heartbreak in North Korea’s labor camps

Helping defectors escape

In North Korea, homeless children like Yoon Hee are called “kotjebes,” or flowering swallows. Like the bird, these children are free to roam, unconstrained by the country’s societal norms.

Without parents, family or schooling, they don’t have as much exposure to the state propaganda that is engrained from childhood, according to advocates. When they escape to neighboring China, it is not so much for political reasons, but to find food.

A U.N. assessment in March found that of the country’s estimated 28 million people, 16 million are chronically deprived of food.

Peter Jung is among those working on behalf of North Korea’s orphans. Based in Seoul, he leads Justice for North Korea, which describes itself as a “volunteer, non-partisan, grassroots organization” that opposes human rights violations in North Korea.

Jung first met North Korean orphans in 1998 in northern China, where he had gone to learn Mandarin.

Jung was stunned to see the stunted size and condition of North Korean orphans. “It was too shocking to believe,” Jung said. “There were children who had skin diseases and with bloated stomachs, collapsing in the streets because of malnutrition.”

Korean children have been found to be about 3 to 4 centimeters shorter than their South Korean counterparts, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.

Nearly 28% of North Korean children suffer from stunting, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Fifteen years after meeting the first of these street orphans, Jung is still helping defectors escape, working from a small, cluttered basement office in the South Korean capital.

‘Hugs and comforts’

For a decade in North Korea, Yoon Hee roamed the streets, slept in crevices and picked rice off the ground that people had dropped.

“I appreciated every single grain of rice,” she said.

Sister baffled by North Korea punishment

Why is North Korea cooling it?

China’s influence in the N. Korea crisis

North Korea’s reluctance to talk

Every night, she had the same concern: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? How can I survive?”

In Ryanggang province where she lived, the average monthly temperature can fall below freezing during the winter months, according to the World Food Programme.

Yoon Hee learned survival skills fitting of “The Hunger Games” — where to scavenge for food, where to sleep, how to stay warm, how to keep safe. She curled into a fetal position in a nook under the windows of houses.

“Sometimes, I wrapped my feet with a plastic bag because it was too cold.”

She slept alone, except for her thoughts of her mother.

“When I almost was starved or freezing to death, the only things I wanted from her were hugs and comforts. I thought that was happiness.”

But she couldn’t recall a single hug from her mother.

Opinion: Why I fled North Korea

Surviving in a new home

Hyuk lost his mother when he was 6, then his father when he was 11.

After his father died, he lived with a group of six other orphan boys in North Hamgyong province, located at the northern most tip of the country.

“We started a fire together, but we still couldn’t sleep because it was so cold,” he said. “We just warmed ourselves with the fire at night and we mainly slept during the day when the sun was shining.

“During the night, we needed to find food to eat. We sometimes stole food from others and gathered food from here and there.”

When something went missing in the neighborhood, the blame automatically fell on Hyuk and his friends, even when they had not been involved. The children would be taken to the police station and tied to chairs, he said.

“The police would then automatically accuse us of stealing because they assume we would have stolen since we don’t have parents. They hit us, tie us up, and torture us. There was no one to defend us.”

Hyuk, now 21, attends Hangyeore Middle-High School, where he sleeps in a bed inside a heated dormitory. The school serves three warm, buffet-style meals a day, and students can pile as much food as they’d like on their metal trays.

In the school’s hallways, girls with sleek black hair and boys with long sweeping bangs are busy texting and taking pictures of themselves on their phablets — a combination smartphone and tablet. Their crisply ironed school uniforms would not be out of place at an English or American boarding school.

It’s a vastly different scene than the childhood Hyuk describes. The blur of hunger, cold and countless police beatings has been replaced by soccer and basketball.

The school, set up by the South Korean government, does not charge tuition.

The North Korean orphans who escape to South Korea often struggle to catch up in a competitive environment where their counterparts have had years of schooling and private tutoring.

While acknowledging hardships adjusting in South Korea, Hyuk said: “I am very comfortable, because I can openly say anything.”

He’s anxious about what he’ll do after he graduates from the school — maybe he’ll go into operating forklifts, Hyuk said.

A mop of shaggy bangs falls over his round face as Hyuk sits atop a table, his legs swinging freely.

“I can eat, live, and survive here.”

Scars from trauma

Most North Koreans escape by crossing the river on the northern border to China. Some street children who flee to China become easy prey to traffickers, according to human rights activists.

The girls are sold into the sex trade, or as wives for rural Chinese men. The young boys are sold as sons into Chinese families who have not been able to produce one, said Jung of Justice for North Korea.

China sends back those escapees they catch, so defectors live in hiding — fearing they’ll be imprisoned and tortured back home.

That fear can continue long after escapees have made it to South Korea.

In the home of pastor Daniel Park, we met a 13-year-old boy whose mother took him to China when he was a year old. The mother was caught and repatriated to North Korea, but the boy remained in China, where he was beaten and abused, Park said.

In Park’s Seoul home, the trauma showed. The boy, sporting a buzz cut, was skittish and jumpy around strangers and followed Park closely around the house. During mealtimes, when his foster family would gather to eat, he would take his food and hide in his bedroom and eat alone.

But Park said his habits have since improved.

Escape through China

As Yoon Hee entered adolescence in North Korea, her hopes of reuniting with her mother began to fade.

A few strangers would give money, others would give her food, shoes or clothes after taking pity on her.

“I had hope thinking that there were people out there who were willing to help me,” she said.

Yoon Hee also ran errands for neighbors to earn change.

But in 2009, the North Korean government exchanged its old currency for a new one worth just 1% of its original value. It immediately wiped out people’s savings and triggered chaos as prices for food became unreachable.

“At that time, so many people were dying,” Yoon Hee said. “If I opened my neighbor’s door, people were dead, collapsed on the floor. So many people headed for China, I thought that at least I could survive there.”

There was nothing left for her in North Korea. Her hopes of reuniting with her mother finally faded.

So she made her first escape into China. In the wintertime, the river at the border freezes, paving the way for a quick escape.

In China, she said she was caught three times by local police and each time, she was sent back to a North Korean prison. She was pummeled with fists, sticks and kicked, Yoon Hee said. But each time, she was released, she said.

In early 2010, she escaped North Korea for the fourth time and eventually met Daniel Park through underground networks of Christian activists and missionaries

Funded by donors and ministries, the networks employ brokers who help refugees cross into China, bribing and using their connections with officials and border officers.

The networks reach Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, countries near China where the authorities will not repatriate North Koreans. From there, North Koreans try to find their way to a South Korean embassy — where they are sent to Seoul — or they seek refuge in the embassy of other countries like Canada, Britain or the U.S.

Yoon Hee stayed with Park and his family in China’s Zheijiang province, further away from the North Korean border.

“She was bright even though she suffered a lot,” Park said, describing his first impressions of the orphan. “I was able to see her pains. She had gone through so many struggles even though she was very young and sometimes when we would pray for her, she wept.”

By October 2010, Park had arranged for Yoon Hee to fly into South Korea.

‘Part of the family’

In Seoul, Yoon Hee emerges from her bedroom in skinny jeans and a red, puffy vest, her nails painted bright pink. She slouches slightly, perked up by frequent texts on her yellow Samsung phone — which is bigger than her hand.

With wide almond-shaped eyes, spotless porcelain skin and silky black hair, Yoon Hee has the kind of features highly coveted in South Korea, a country obsessed with beauty and youth.

At 19, she could easily be mistaken for a middle school student in Seoul. Yoon Hee stands less than 5 feet tall.

She lives with Park, his wife, their two sons, who are toddlers and four other North Korean children — two boys and two girls.

Their permanent home in Seoul is humble. In the winter, bubble wrap is taped to the windows to keep the house warm.

The walls are scrawled with crayon doodles. Stuffed animals, toy ducks and books rest atop bookshelves and coffee tables. The children crawl over the taupe-colored sofa and scramble onto the living room table.

At times, Yoon Hee talks freely about her life. But there are some questions she’d rather not answer.

She seems more comfortable around the younger children.

And they flock to Yoon Hee as arbiter of all things toddler — toy disputes and snack requests, cries for hugs and sibling rivalries. The other children squeal and scamper around the house, but Yoon Hee rarely raises her voice with them.

“When they make mistakes, I try to show ways to fix their thinking that they can be guided well,” she said, “even though they don’t have their moms.”

Her kinship with the other orphans is forged out of hardship. Park’s two toddler sons look up to her as “unni,” or older sister.

“In this house, she’s a part of us,” Park said. “Part of the family.”

When an older child steals a toy from his younger brother, Yoon Hee scolds him.

“It’s not OK to steal your little brother’s toy,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

But as the older child sulks, Yoon Hee pulls him close and tickles him — giving love and attention that she didn’t have in her childhood.

Two years after her arrival in Seoul, Yoon Hee’s days are busy from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. with studies and a part-time job.

She sleeps on the floor inside a pristine wood-paneled room with a white teddy bear, lying next to the other North Korean girls on pink blankets.

Sometimes, she dreams of her mother even though she hasn’t seen or talked to her in more than a decade.

“I would rather give her love than blame her,” Yoon Hee said, “even though I wasn’t loved.”

In ways, her life has been shaped by her abandonment by those who were supposed to care for her. But Yoon Hee found a new family by abandoning the place that once was home — but ultimately had nothing left to give.

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Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_world/~3/ixGF7U6wbic/index.html

Editor’s note: “Real Sports: Pakistan’s Maria Toor Pakay” premieres at 2200 ET (0300 GMT) on February 19 on HBO.

(CNN) — Chingaiz Khan was an unknown quantity when he arrived for a junior weightlifting tournament in South Waziristan nine years ago.

Chaotic and intensely religious, the Pakistani region is known by locals as “the most dangerous place in the world.”

The 12-year-old Chingaiz, with his short, jet-black hair and smooth, unblemished skin, looked younger than the other boys. But, despite it being his first ever tournament, he was still stronger than everyone else.

Human to Hero: Nicol David

Competition climbing began in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, according to the International Federation of Sport Climbing.

Wakeboarding is overseen by the International Wasterski Wakeboard Federation and World Wakeboard Council, with 91 allied federations worldwide, according to the IWWF’s website.

The Federaton Internationale de Roller Sports is the international governing body for all roller-skating-based sports. Championships have been conducted in roller hockey, road racing, track racing and artistic roller skating, according to the federation’s website.

Baseball was last played as an Olympic sport in the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

Squash failed in a bid to be added to the 2016 Games in Rio with the IOC favoring golf and seven-sides rugby instead.

The World Karate Championships are held every two years. The most recent championships had more than 1,000 athletes from 116 countries participating, according to the governing World Karate Federation.

Softball was voted out of the Olympics after the 2008 Games in Beijing. It is combining with baseball in a bid to get back into the Games in 2020.

Wushu is a Chinese martial art, practiced as a means of combat in ancient times and by common citizens as a means of self-defense and physical training, according to the International Wushu Federation.

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Photos: Shortlisted Olympics sports for 2020

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Nicol David: Malaysia’s squash icon

Nicol David is a six-time world champion who is fronting a campaign aimed at getting squash into the 2020 Olympics.

The Malaysian is starring in a wide variety of promotional material, in addition to creating a Facebook page aimed at raising awareness of the campaign.

David was joined at the promotional shoot by Ramy Ashour, the Egyptian who is ranked fourth in the men’s game.

The promotion is being guided by Verocom, the company behind Rio’s successful 2016 bid and the campaign which saw the 2022 FIFA World Cup awarded to Qatar.

Rugby sevens will be part of the Olympic program for the first time in Rio four years from now. A campaign by Mike Lee and Verocom helped the shortened version of the sport successfully lobby the International Olympic Committee for a place at the Games.

In 2016, golf will return to the Games for the first time since 1904. Back then it was an amateur game, but now highly-paid professionals such as PGA champion Rory McIlroy will be able to take part.

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Squash’s Olympic bid

For his father Shams-Ul Wazir, a local college lecturer, the decision to register his son for the tournament paid off handsomely.

Chingaiz was crowned the junior boys’ weightlifting champion, the first step on a journey that would take him into the world of professional sport.

Except Chingaiz wasn’t really his name.

Chingaiz was actually called Maria Toor Pakay.

Chingaiz was a girl.

“I suggested the name of Chingaiz Khan for her since she had always been like a boy,” explained Al Wazir in an interview with HBO. “She liked the name very much.”

Girls and boys

This isn’t a story of deception, but rather a tale of necessity.

Maria Toor Pakay is Pakistan’s number one squash player, ranked 49th in the world. She also comes from an ultra conservative region in Pakistan that is home to the Taliban.

Female participation in any form of public life is strongly discouraged, by both words and deeds. Education, working, sports; anything involving women leaving the house unaccompanied by a male relative was seen as the work of the devil.

Teen athlete fled Taliban stronghold to pursue dream

But Pakay had talent. Her weightlifting triumph gave her access to a world of sporting options that would otherwise have been out of bounds to her as a female, and she discovered the discipline where she would make her name.

Squash is one of Pakistan’s most popular games and Pakay excelled at it. By the age of 21 she had gone pro and broken into the world top 50, an incredible rise up the world rankings. She is one of only three Pakistani women in the top 200; by contrast the nation has 15 men in the same strata.

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Officials: Drone killed Taliban commander

Yet her success has come at a price. Pakay and her father have been threatened with retribution by the local Taliban for insulting their culture and their religion.

“My area, my tribal regions are called the hub of terrorism and extremism,” said Pakay.

“It’s the home to the Taliban, and it’s called the most dangerous place in the world. But I have a big vision for my country, and for my people it will be stopped. I always thought that maybe I’m the chosen one.”

Standing up

Pakay realized at a young age that she was different to other people she saw in her community.

“When I was four and a half, I told my parents that I want clothes like my brother,” she said.

“I want to play with boys, there’s more freedom, I felt. And I am not like girls who play with dolls. I want the toy guns and things like that.”

Such behavior was anathema to the deeply conservative community she was born into. But her father agreed. Rather than forcing his daughter to conform, he thought about how best to realize his daughter’s talent. It was he who came up with the plan to cut his daughter’s hair and enter into competitions with the boys.

Read: Squash gladiator on ‘physical chess’

“They (religious elders) sent me to a mental asylum ’cause they thought that I had deviated from the culture, and that I was crazy supporting women’s rights,” he recalled.

“They said I was spoiling the whole environment and that all women would want the same rights.”

Malala thanks supporters

Pakistan Taliban militant killed

Insurgents create havoc in Afghanistan

With the boys’ junior weightlifting title under her belt, Pakay decided to enter a boys’ squash tournament. Her disguise was scuppered by bureaucracy.

“My dad said, ‘This … that’s my son,’ ” Pakay recalled of the moment her father presented her to be registered. But the official dropped a bombshell. “He said, ‘OK, we need the birth certificate, too.’ “

Threat

Shams-Ul Wazir decided to come clean, and entered her in the girls’ competitions. She destroyed the opposition and, at the age of 15, was national champion. It was then that the trouble started.

“I found a letter on the windshield of my car. It was signed by the name of ‘Taliban,’ ” her father said.

“They told me — they threatened me — ‘Stop your girl from playing squash because it is bringing a bad name to our culture and to Islam.’ They told me, ‘If you do not do this then you will have to suffer very bad consequences.’

“I ignored that threat … (but) we were very much concerned that she might get shot or she might get kidnapped.”

The warning terrified Pakay. Scared for the safety of her family, she decided not play in public.

“I told my dad that I might need a gun. I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He said, ‘It’s your decision. I never stopped you from anything. You wanna play or not?’

“Squash is everything for me. And I know that when a girl is kidnapped, it’s the biggest dishonor. I’m not gonna bring dishonor for them, ever.”

So Pakay played in the house, lonely and miserable. From dusk until dawn she hit the ball against the wall with her “Jonathan Power” racket. Her father knew that if he wanted his daughter to realize her potential, she had to leave Pakistan.

“He said, ‘Okay, if you wanna play, just leave the country. That’s all you can do.’ “

The Power of persistence

Pakay agreed. For three long years she would write to everyone. Clubs, players, educational institutions. Nothing. But then, when she was 18 years old, she received her only reply. She recognized the name. It was the same name that graced her first racket: that of former world champion Jonathan Power.

“I couldn’t believe that there was a woman squash player from Waziristan, let alone, one that could actually play,” said Power of the day he received Pakay’s email.

Power retired at the top of his game, as number one in the world. He never left squash. Instead he set up a national academy in his home town of Toronto, looking to find talent in people from places squash rarely reaches. Pakay’s letter melted him. It read:

Dear sir,

I’m Maria Toor Pakay Wazir. I belong to South Waziristan agency of Pakistan’s tribal areas on the Pak-Afghan border. South Waziristan one of Pakistan’s most turbulent tribal agencies and the home to Taliban is also my home. Here girls of my age are passing their lives in such miserable conditions.

They are restricted to four walls despite having the desire to come out of the Stone Age and get assimilated with the rest of the world.

I will be waiting for your positive response.

Regard,

Maria Toor Pakay Wazir, professional squash player.

Power was moved to reply, and soon Pakay was on a flight to Canada.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said.

“She left on just hope, on a one-way ticket and 200 bucks on an email promise from me.”

World champion

The aim for Pakay is to be world champion. She works from morning to night with Power, moving up the rankings as she gets close to realizing her dream.

Being away from her family is tough. She talks to them every day on the internet. She scours the news sites looking for information on suicide bombings and killings, praying they are nowhere near her home. So far, they haven’t been.

“The timeline is ’till she’s world champion and she goes home with a trophy,” Power asserted confidently. “There is no substitute.”

Yet in a region where some revile a woman’s sporting success, a world championship has extra problems. More publicity, greater exposure, increased danger. That doesn’t matter to Pakay. Success could open up opportunities for others like her, playing squash or lifting weights or kicking a soccer ball in their bedrooms as they wait for the world outside to change.

“Someone wants to kill me? Kill me once I bring the change and I become a world champion,” she said.

“But not before.”

Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/18/sport/squash-pakistan-maria-toor-pakay/index.html?eref=edition

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Maia Stack, who was born in Hangzhou, China, said a trip back when she was 17 helped her to shape her identity as Chinese and American.

Stack first visited the pagoda where she was abandoned as a baby when she was 11 years old.

Stack, front right, has a sister who was also adopted from China. The family first visited when Stack was 11 and her sister was 7 years old.

June Cubbage-Troop asked her parents to take her back to China when she was five years old.

June was adopted when she was two years old. At the young age of six, she exihbits pride in her heritage, her parents say.

June’s parents, Amy Cubbage and Graham Troop, said it’s important to teach her about Chinese culture because she didn’t have a choice in leaving the country.

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Hong Kong (CNN) — When Maia Stack returned to the pagoda, or tower, where she had been abandoned as a baby she was overwhelmed by what had happened there 11 years earlier.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I wonder if my birth family hid behind those bushes or something’” said Stack, now 18 years old, on returning to Hangzhou, China.

“I felt very disengaged throughout the entire process. I kind of removed myself from the situation because it was too emotionally challenging.”

Stack is one of tens of thousands of children — 95% percent of whom are girls — who have been adopted from China since its government ratified international adoption in 1992.

In 1979, Chinese officials introduced the one-child policy requiring that couples have only one child to slow the country’s massive population growth.

Could China’s one-child policy change?

With only one chance to pass on the family name, many Chinese couples are unhappy having a girl and either abort the pregnancy or abandon the baby.

Because of this, China is one of the easiest countries from which to do an international adoption, according to ACC, a U.S.-based adoption agency that specializes in China. The process takes around two years and costs between US$19,000 and $23,000.

Many of those adoptees eventually visit China to experience their heritage first-hand.

Being Chinese helped to define Stack’s childhood growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She and her sister, who is also adopted from China, attended a Saturday school to learn Chinese language and culture while other children were playing soccer or baseball.

Stack was home schooled until partway through high school and attended a group of students that never treated her differently. However, when she started attending a charter school where she was the only Asian in a group of 40 students things changed.

“I did feel much like an outsider. I had the darkest skin, the only head of black hair in a sea of blond and brown,” she said. “As the ‘representative Asian,’ the kids fed back to me the typical stereotypes about Asians — super smart, good in math, short … While they didn’t mean harm, it did hurt.”

Spending four-and-a-half months in Beijing in 2011 studying Mandarin changed her outlook.

“I feel very proud to be both Chinese and American,” she said. “I know that those things will always be a part of me whether I live in China or in America.”

Today, Stack is a board member of China’s Children International — an organization founded by high school girls to bring together Chinese adoptees around the world.

Amy Cubbage and her husband, Graham Troop, adopted their daughter June from China when she was two years old. After deciding they wanted children, the couple chose to adopt internationally because of the positive experience Cubbage’s sister had adopting children from Russia.

They applied for a non-special needs adoption in 2006, Cubbage said. But after nearly two years and no match, they put their names on the list for special needs children — meaning the child requires some form of medical treatment.

Finally in the fall of 2008, the couple was connected with June, who had been born with a cleft lip that has been repaired.

As she grew older, June enjoyed attending Chinese cultural events so much that, at the age of five, she asked her parents if she could visit China.

“We were going to take her back eventually,” said Troop, a librarian in Louisville, Kentucky. “I was a little surprised because it was a little early, but we felt that if she was asking to go she must have a need to go.”

The family made the trek to China last month visiting the Great Wall, Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and June’s orphanage in Guangxi province, among other sites.

“She was joyful the whole time,” Cubbage, a lawyer, said of her daughter. “It was clear that she had a large connection to the place.”

Upon visiting with the foster family that tended to their daughter June’s parents were overcome with emotion.

“We could see the love that they had on their faces for her and the sadness that they didn’t have her anymore,” Cubbage said. “I know they are happy that she was adopted but it was easy to see that they were sad too.”

Six-year-old June already shows a great deal of interest in her Chinese heritage, but it’s not always easy to explain.

“She asks why her parents couldn’t take care of her and we try and answer that as best as we can. It’s hard,” her father said. “(Hearing about her adoption) is sort of a comfort to her. She likes to hear her story told.”

The family plans to return to China regularly.

“The bottom line for us is that we chose to do an international adoption. She didn’t. She didn’t have any other choice,” Cubbage said. “So I feel as a mom it is my responsibility to teach her.”

Jenna Murphy* and her husband are taking their five-year-old daughter to China in September — something they decided before they even brought her home.

“We’re doing it in stages. She won’t go back to the province where she was born this time,” Murphy said. “We will just go to the major cities and the touristy, lovely places.”

When they picked their daughter up from the orphanage, she was 10 months old and could barely sit up, but after bringing her home to Australia her development quickly improved.

Murphy said she wants her daughter to have a positive opinion of her birth country despite the challenges she has already faced in life.

“I don’t want her to think ‘they didn’t want me’… or for it to be even in the realm of possibility,” Murphy said. “I want her to see China as a good thing.”

As for Stack, the high school senior said she wants to take a year off before college to volunteer in a Chinese orphanage.

“I’m so blessed to have been adopted,” she said. “I feel compelled to go back to China and volunteer and give back to the kids that weren’t adopted.”

*Name has been changed to protect her from South Australian law prohibiting adopted children from being identified in the media.

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Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/17/world/asia/chinese-adoptees-return/index.html?eref=edition

(CNN) — A newly discovered account of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and his death the next morning, gives a vivid and moving picture of the calamity.

Dr. Charles Leale was in the audience at Ford’s Theater when Lincoln was shot, and was the first to attempt to treat the stricken president.

In a report believed written the next day, April 15, 1865, Leale writes, “the report of a pistol was distinctly heard and about a minute after a man of low stature with black hair and eyes was seen leaping to the stage beneath, holding in his hand a drawn dagger.” Stumbling as he leaped from the president’s box, the man “ran to the opposite side of the stage, flourishing in his hand a drawn dagger and disappearing behind the scene.”

Leale ran to the president’s box, about 40 feet from where he’d been sitting, where he encountered Mary Lincoln. She said, ” ‘O Doctor, do what you can for him! Do what you can!’ I told her we would do all that we possibly could,” Leale writes.

Then he saw the president. “He was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition.”

Leale was just 23, and had only barely begun practicing medicine after his service in the Civil War. He describes how he tried to treat the injury, beginning with asking another man to cut off Lincoln’s coat and shirt to find any stab wounds.

Leale first believed Lincoln had been stabbed, because of that sighting of John Wilkes Booth wielding a knife. But soon Leale realized the president’s injury was a gunshot in the back of his head.

Leale writes that he “passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball, and found that it had entered the encephalon. As soon as I removed my finger a slight oozing of blood followed and his breathing became more regular.” Lincoln is then given some brandy, and two more doctors arrive.

The report was found by Helena Iles Papaioannou, a researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, at the National Archives in Washington. She discovered it among the papers of the U.S. surgeon general. Her group’s mission is to collect all documents “to and from Abraham Lincoln,” she said, and she came upon a copy of Leale’s report by accident on May 21. The report is not in Leale’s own hand, but is a “true copy” written by a clerk.

“Its immediacy makes it so very moving,” said Papaioannou. “But it’s also so very clinical, and you realize how awful it was — the injury that Lincoln sustained was just horrific.”

Read the full document

Standing outside Ford’s Theater in downtown Washington, Papaioannou explained it was too far to take Lincoln to the White House, so the doctors took him to a house across the street. “You can see how narrow the street is,” she said, pointing from Ford’s Theater across to the historic Peterson House, where tourists were taking guided tours of the site. “Even that little journey was traumatic.”

There is no indication that Leale and the other doctors had any way to save Lincoln.

“You get a sense of helplessness,” said Papaioannou. “I think it was fairly immediate that he realized that the president wasn’t going to recover.” Papaioannou said that, to her, the most moving part of Leale’s report is his account of covering Lincoln shortly after the president was carried to a back bedroom of the Peterson House.

“He talks about how the president’s legs — his lower extremities, from the knees down — were cold, and they brought him hot water bottles and hot blankets. I find that a very touching part of the report.”

The document also describes in clinical terms the president’s deterioration that night. Near the end of the report it states: “At 7:20 a.m. he breathed his last and ‘the spirit fled to God who gave it.’ “

The very last line of the report seems to relay how absorbed Leale became in the gravity of the moment. “Immediately after death had taken place, we all bowed and the Rev. Dr. Gurley supplicated to God in behalf of the bereaved family and our afflicted country.”

Papaioannou talks about the moment she discovered this document. “I took it out of the box, and started reading through it — reading parts out to my colleagues who sat at the same table as me. … We realized we had something special on our hands.”

John Elliff, with the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, said the newly discovered report largely corroborates the account that Leale eventually published over 40 years later, in 1909.

While it adds only a few details to known accounts of Lincoln’s final hours, Elliff said, “this report has more exact times and pulse rate measurements through the night — an intriguing new detail for historians.”

Agreeing with the researchers who found it, Elliff said that the document has a compelling immediacy, and is unclouded by the passage of time.

“The original report does get you right close to the event — knowing that the doctor leaves the bedside and writes it within the day,” he said.

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Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/07/us/lincoln-document-assasination/index.html?eref=edition

(CNN) — A newly discovered account of the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and his death the next morning, gives a vivid and moving picture of the calamity.

Dr. Charles Leale was in the audience at Ford’s Theater when Lincoln was shot, and was the first to attempt to treat the stricken president.

In a report believed written the next day, April 15, 1865, Leale writes, “the report of a pistol was distinctly heard and about a minute after a man of low stature with black hair and eyes was seen leaping to the stage beneath, holding in his hand a drawn dagger.” Stumbling as he leaped from the president’s box, the man “ran to the opposite side of the stage, flourishing in his hand a drawn dagger and disappearing behind the scene.”

Leale ran to the president’s box, about 40 feet from where he’d been sitting, where he encountered Mary Lincoln. She said, ” ‘O Doctor, do what you can for him! Do what you can!’ I told her we would do all that we possibly could,” Leale writes.

Then he saw the president. “He was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition.”

Leale was just 23, and had only barely begun practicing medicine after his service in the Civil War. He describes how he tried to treat the injury, beginning with asking another man to cut off Lincoln’s coat and shirt to find any stab wounds.

Leale first believed Lincoln had been stabbed, because of that sighting of John Wilkes Booth wielding a knife. But soon Leale realized the president’s injury was a gunshot in the back of his head.

Leale writes that he “passed the little finger of my left hand through the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball, and found that it had entered the encephalon. As soon as I removed my finger a slight oozing of blood followed and his breathing became more regular.” Lincoln is then given some brandy, and two more doctors arrive.

The report was found by Helena Iles Papaioannou, a researcher for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, at the National Archives in Washington. She discovered it among the papers of the U.S. surgeon general. Her group’s mission is to collect all documents “to and from Abraham Lincoln,” she said, and she came upon a copy of Leale’s report by accident on May 21. The report is not in Leale’s own hand, but is a “true copy” written by a clerk.

“Its immediacy makes it so very moving,” said Papaioannou. “But it’s also so very clinical, and you realize how awful it was — the injury that Lincoln sustained was just horrific.”

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Standing outside Ford’s Theater in downtown Washington, Papaioannou explained it was too far to take Lincoln to the White House, so the doctors took him to a house across the street. “You can see how narrow the street is,” she said, pointing from Ford’s Theater across to the historic Peterson House, where tourists were taking guided tours of the site. “Even that little journey was traumatic.”

There is no indication that Leale and the other doctors had any way to save Lincoln.

“You get a sense of helplessness,” said Papaioannou. “I think it was fairly immediate that he realized that the president wasn’t going to recover.” Papaioannou said that, to her, the most moving part of Leale’s report is his account of covering Lincoln shortly after the president was carried to a back bedroom of the Peterson House.

“He talks about how the president’s legs — his lower extremities, from the knees down — were cold, and they brought him hot water bottles and hot blankets. I find that a very touching part of the report.”

The document also describes in clinical terms the president’s deterioration that night. Near the end of the report it states: “At 7:20 a.m. he breathed his last and ‘the spirit fled to God who gave it.’ “

The very last line of the report seems to relay how absorbed Leale became in the gravity of the moment. “Immediately after death had taken place, we all bowed and the Rev. Dr. Gurley supplicated to God in behalf of the bereaved family and our afflicted country.”

Papaioannou talks about the moment she discovered this document. “I took it out of the box, and started reading through it — reading parts out to my colleagues who sat at the same table as me. … We realized we had something special on our hands.”

John Elliff, with the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, said the newly discovered report largely corroborates the account that Leale eventually published over 40 years later, in 1909.

While it adds only a few details to known accounts of Lincoln’s final hours, Elliff said, “this report has more exact times and pulse rate measurements through the night — an intriguing new detail for historians.”

Agreeing with the researchers who found it, Elliff said that the document has a compelling immediacy, and is unclouded by the passage of time.

“The original report does get you right close to the event — knowing that the doctor leaves the bedside and writes it within the day,” he said.

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Article source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/07/us/lincoln-document-assasination/index.html?eref=edition