Learning Freedom: Help Educate North Korean Youth

For over a decade our programs, which are now co-funded by the Learning Freedom campaign on Global Giving, have helped young North Koreans reach their full potential in South Korea. Today, many of those youth are blossoming into creative, passionate, and successful young adults. Many of these 20- and 30-somethings became our students after living as street children in North Korea, where they were deprived of proper nutrition, education and a secure family environment. They have now spent many years in South Korea, yet they remember vividly the human rights abuses they faced in North Korea, as well as they difficulties they had to overcome in South Korea.

One of these remarkable individuals was recently featured in the Washington Post, written by Anna Fifield. The article—titled A young North Korean defector finds his voice — in rap—showcases 29-year-old Kang Chun-hyok. Chun-hyok is an aspiring hip-hop musician and visual artist. Over the years he participated in our programs such as the Hangyoreh School. Although he is now an adult, he has remained involved with the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (NKHR), and we continue to support his dream of being an artist and rapper, first by supporting him to enter art college, and now by exhibiting his art and helping him record his own music with professional artists.

Below are excerpts from Ms. Fifield’s article about Chun-hyok and the burgeoning generation of North Korean defectors.

Most rap songs do not deal with matters of geopolitical significance —such as nuclear weapons and labor camps —but Kang Chun-hyok is not most rappers. The 29-year-old is an escapee from North Korea, where the most boundary-pushing music is revolutionary opera extolling the virtues of Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder.

 Now, Kang wants to be the greatest rapper North Korea has ever produced. With a lack of rivals to the title, he may well be able to claim it.

 “You took money that we made digging earth to fund nuclear weapons. Take out that fat from your pot belly. Nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons,” he rapped at the opening of an exhibition in Seoul this month titled “Kkotjebi in Bloom.”

 Kang is one of a generation of North Korean defectors coming of age and finding his voice in South Korea. [. . .] “These are people who came here 10 years ago and are the first wave of high school and university graduates,” said Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director general of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. “Now they’re writing books, painting, showing leadership in their own areas. They’re like eggs that are hatching.”

 “People here don’t know anything about what’s going on in North Korea,” Kang said in an interview at the exhibition, “so I’m trying to show what is really happening there.”

Through the continued generosity of our supporters, Learning Freedom can help more North Korean youth like Chun-hyok pursue their dreams—whatever those may be—and become their full selves.    

Read Ms. Fifield’s full article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/north-korean-defectors-finding-their-voices-in-the-south/2014/08/16/8644513f-dd5d-44ad-8dd1-f4059770ec90_story.html