Free My Holiday in North Korea by Wendy E. Simmons Page A

look at the board showed why. Here’s what was written:

    That crazy tower in Pisa
    Grammar (1) She said, “The school begins at 8:20 at our school every day (change into reported speech)
    (2) My mother wanted me to write a diary every day (choose make, let, have)
    (3) Rewrite using with “enough”
    The food was too hot to eat
    Maybe it made more sense in English?
    It was during moments like these—surrounded by a plethora of minders, standing in a classroom wired with security cameras and populated with students who I believe had been media trained to within an inch of their lives—that I would wonder to myself, why couldn’t they just get that last bit right? Surely they could have kidnapped or held prisoner someone with a better grasp of the English language who could have prepared a more intelligent lesson plan? Or when mankind failed, couldn’t the Great Dear One just go there and point?
    I decided to switch positions and move to the front of the room, just inside the open doorway, where I could see all the students’ faces and reactions as they followed along.
    They all seemed so happy and engaged. But wasn’t this what they did every day? Perform for tourists? Did they have practice run-throughs and drills, like their Children’s Palace counterparts? Was any real learning taking place here?
    I wasn’t going to let one highly polished, over-the-top performance by North Korean child prodigies ruin all NoKo children for me. These kids were belly laughing and guffawing and having so much fun, I refused to believe it was staged.
    Another Brit who taught math took to the center of the room. I nearly shed a tear when he asked one of the students if he could calculate the square root of some number (which of course I could not), and the student immediately got the answer right. There was indeed hope for all of us yet.
    I then noticed one student staring at me. He was sitting a few rows back on the left and was the only student wearing blue. When our eyes met, he held my gaze instead of looking down or away, and he smiled. I smiled back and gave a tiny, silent wave hello. Then I held up my camera and nodded to ask if he minded if I took his photo. He smiled back nodding that yes, it was okay, so I did, and then nodded again to say thank you.

    It reminded me of a moment long ago when I was in Jaipur, India. I was sitting in the back of a car stopped at a light that was besieged by indigent children begging loudly for food and money. As they jostled one another to gain position in front of the rolled-up window where I was sitting, a tiny young girl managed to emerge in front. She stood there silently, staring at me, as the chaos continued around her. We held one another’s eyes for a moment.
    For whatever reason I held my palm to the glass, and then she held her palm up to mine and smiled. Time froze as we looked at one another, smiling, our hands held together, aligned through the glass. I burst into tears when I realized too late that the light had turned green and our car was speeding off, with no way to go back.
    I remember that little girl vividly. I think about that moment to this day and wonder whether she remembers me, too. It reminded me then, as it always does now, that what I do when I travel matters.
    I’ve had so many incredible life-altering moments when everything else just falls away—when all the back-and-forth in my head quiets down and all my questions and doubts recede, and I’m just there, sharing a moment. And for that moment, it’s about as real as it gets.
    When the tour ended, our troop of handlers and hangers-on filed back into the hallway. Fresh Handler and I made a quick stop in the bathroom, where for once there was running water—only this time it wouldn’t stop, so the bathroom floor was a stinky, wet mess. I pretended I wasn’t wearing flip-flops and took comfort in the fact that we would be heading back that afternoon to my second home, the Koryo Hotel, where I was lucky to