Free Escape from North Korea by Melanie Kirkpatrick

“helping them live safe and happy lives” in China. 10 Mike Kim spent four years secretly guiding North Koreans out of China while working as a martial arts instructor there.
    Tim Peters and his network have begun to devote more of their resources to caring for the children of Chinese men and the North Koreans brides they purchased. He estimates that there are scores of thousands of such half-and-half children, many of whom lack the official Chinese identity cards without which they cannot go to school or receive medical care.
    Peters is not a fan of bringing half-and-half children out of China on the new underground railroad. “You might help a few,” he said,
“but then what?” He thinks group homes, run by foster parents who are Christian, are a better option and a way to help a greater number of children. Down the road, as the children get older, he would like to establish vocational schools to teach them farming, mechanical trades, hair dressing, and other productive skills.
    Meanwhile, fifteen years after he helped launch the new underground railroad, Peters’s work in China continues. In early 2012, he warned that this was an especially difficult period for Christians helping North Koreans in the border area. Since the middle of 2011, his colleagues on the ground had been reporting that China and North Korea were ramping up efforts to prevent border crossings. North Korea was building underground bunkers for border guards, making it easier for them to spot people crossing the river. China was said to be erecting a ten-foot-high barrier fence along the Yalu River at a popular crossing point near the Chinese city of Dandong. Peters’s colleagues in the border area also reported the presence of an unusually large number of North Korean government agents posing as refugees. “The North Korean agents are there with the cooperation of the Chinese government,” he said. “Why? They are trying to hinder the flow of refugees and break up the aid networks.”
    Peters had an additional worry: finding more Christian workers to go to China to help North Koreans. The number of missionaries in the field has been decimated by imprisonments, expulsions, and harassment by Chinese authorities. He was finding it hard to recruit workers willing to risk working in China.
    On a speaking tour of Korean-American churches in the United States, he told his audiences, “I want you , not just your money.” It was a pitch that deliberately called upon the congregants’ Korean heritage. Peters reckoned it would be embarrassing for Korean-Americans to hear such a plea from someone who was not ethnically Korean. He hoped to shock his audiences into action.
    Peters emphasized the same message in his speeches in South Korea, the nation that is second only to the United States in the
number of Christian missionaries it sends overseas. South Korean missionaries are active worldwide—in South America, Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent. They go to places that are at least as dangerous as China, if not more so. In Afghanistan in 2007, the Taliban captured twenty-three South Korean missionaries and held them hostage. Two were murdered.
    In Seoul, Peters made his pitch to an assembly of divinity students at Chongshin University. Chongshin’s famous divinity school was founded in Pyongyang in 1901 and relocated south during the Korean War. Today, its graduates disperse to the four corners of the world to preach the Gospel. One would think that the school’s roots in the North would give it a special interest in reaching out to North Koreans. That was not what Peters found.
    Peters described his interaction with the students at Chongshin. “Who’s going to India?” he asked the assembled seminarians. Lots of hands shot up. India is a popular spot for missionary work, and the South Korean students clearly were enthusiastic about the prospect of working there.
    â€œThen I asked,