Running Out of the Darkness

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TIM PETERS CAME TO BE ONE OF THE founding members of the underground railroad long after he first arrived in South Korea. He was a senior at Michigan State University when he dropped out after what he calls "a highly transforming conversion to Christ." Within a few months, in 1975, he was in Seoul as a lay missionary, where he joined what has become Christianity's great success story in Asia. "Think of Korea's history," says Peters. "Conquest and occupation by other nations, poverty, civil war. It's fraught with suffering--suffering now experienced most acutely by North Koreans. This is the fertile soil in which the Gospel always thrives." About 30% of South Korea's population identifies itself as Christian. At night the neon crosses that sit atop countless churches in Seoul are visible as far as the eye can see.

When Peters arrived in South Korea, it was an authoritarian state. As part of his missionary work, he became involved in human-rights issues and was soon thrown out of the country for handing out leaflets that criticized the Seoul regime. After a new government came to power, he returned to Seoul in the late '80s and went back a third time in 1996. South Korea was by then a democratic, prosperous nation, but North Korea was in the midst of a horrific famine. "One night it just dawned on me. I wasn't here this time for South Korea. I was here for the North, to try to do the Lord's work and help people there. It couldn't have been any clearer." Peters formed Helping Hands Korea in 1996, and within just two years, as refugees tried to escape the famine, the beginnings of the underground railroad took shape. The organization's mission became more focused: helping North Koreans in crisis, people who really needed help getting out.

Kim Myong Suk was one of them. In February 1998, she fled North Korea for China. In October of that year, however, Chinese police conducted one of their periodic raids in search of refugees from the North. She tried to hide, but two policemen discovered her. She was arrested and sent back to North Korea, where she was sentenced to three years in a labor camp. "We were so hungry in the camps that we used to pick up and eat the remains of apples that the guards had thrown away." After a year and a half, during which she says she was beaten and had the forced abortion, she was released under a special amnesty decree.

She went to live in Onsong, a town near the border with China, and quickly decided that she would try to flee again. Her mother and an older sister had followed her out of North Korea and were living in Heilongjiang, a province in northeastern China. Refugees say the most common way to cross the 900-mile North Korea-- China border is to bribe a guard on the Korean side. Kim, however, relied on a friend who lived near the border and each night watched the routes patrolled by the guards. "You knew where they were going to be and where they weren't going to be and when," Kim says. "My friend guided me." On a bitterly cold night in early March 2002, she went for it. "My head and my heart were pounding," she says. If caught--either in the attempt or in China--she would have received at least a long prison sentence and could quite possibly have been executed. At 2 a.m., with no guards in sight and clutching just one small bag with a change of clothes in it, she hustled across the frozen Tumen River and into China for the second time.