{"id":53410,"date":"2016-03-31T16:10:39","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T23:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=53410"},"modified":"2016-03-31T16:10:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-31T23:10:39","slug":"christianity-was-the-only-way-out-says-north-korean-defector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/03\/31\/christianity-was-the-only-way-out-says-north-korean-defector\/","title":{"rendered":"Christianity was the only way out, says North Korean defector"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy\u00a0theguardian.com<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Joseph Kim revered the Great Leader as a child, but on arriving in China he realised that if he embraced Jesus missionaries would help him escape<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2015\/oct\/18\/christianity-defectors-escape-route-north-korea<\/p>\n

The first time Joseph Kim heard the words Christian\u201d and church\u201d, he had no idea what they meant. He had never seen a church and Christianity<\/a> was as unfamiliar to him in his famine-ravaged North Korea as Disneyland.<\/p>\n

Kwang Jin\u201d, a friend said to him, using the Korean name by which Kim was then known, if you ever go to China<\/a>, the churches will give you money.\u201d<\/p>\n

To which Kim replied: What\u2019s a church? Why would they just give you money?\u201d<\/p>\n

Because they\u2019re Christians,\u201d the friend said.<\/p>\n

What are Christians?\u201d Kim asked.<\/p>\n

That Kim should have known nothing about Christianity<\/a> when he was growing up in North Korea was hardly surprising. Born in 1990, the only belief system to which he was exposed as a child was reverence, mixed with fear, for the Great Leader.<\/p>\n

When he was very young he was taught in kindergarten about the magical powers of Kim Il-sung<\/a>, then supreme leader of the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Kim learned that the dictator was the smartest man in the world and that he was able to fly around the countryside keeping watch over all his children.<\/p>\n

But if the cult of the Great Leader left no room for Christianity, or any other organised religion in Kim\u2019s youth, the importance of money was most certainly not lost on him. Prolonged famine had struck the country when he was five, killing more than a million people and in effect turning Kim into an orphan. His father died of hunger-induced illness, his mother ended up in a North Korean prison camp, and his beloved sister was probably sold as a child bride in China.<\/p>\n

As he describes in his memoir of becoming a defector, Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America<\/a>, Kim was driven to increasingly desperate measures to survive. He ate wild plants and raspberry leaves, snails and grasshoppers, lived by petty crime and joined a network of homeless thieves called the gangster brothers\u201d.<\/p>\n

Eventually in 2006, at the age of 16, he decided he had nothing left to lose and made the perilous journey from his town of Hoeryong in the north of the country across the Tumen river into China.<\/p>\n

He remembered what his friend had told him about churches giving money, which chimed with what somebody told him as he knocked on doors in search of food inside China. You must go to a Christian church,\u201d a Chinese woman said.<\/p>\n

How do I find this church?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

Look for a cross,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n