LiNK Seeking Resettlement Volunteers for North Korean Refugees in the United States

This is from LiNK‘s latest newsletter:

As the number of North Korean refugees arriving in the US for resettlement increases, we can also expect increasing numbers of unaccompanied refugee minors (children or teenagers), many of them orphaned entirely, and all who will be starting new lives in America.

We are seeking families to become foster families for these children that can help to serve as a bridge between two very different cultures. Families with a Korean-American background or Korean-speaking ability are a plus. If you are interested, please email jimin (at) linkglobal.org, with the subject line “Resettlement Families”, as well as your location.

We are also seeking local mentors, translators and general “buddies” to volunteer at resettlement centers across the US, to befriend and to help transition newly arrived North Koreans. If you are interested in volunteering in your local area to help resettle refugees, please send a resume and a cover letter to jimin (at) linkglobal.org, explaining your interest and experience; subject line “Resettlement Volunteer”.

That implies that more North Koreans are coming into the United States than the media have reported. There could be understandable reasons for keeping this quiet. My own meetings with North Koreans have been, well, mixed, as you’d expect with any group of individual human beings, but a high percentage of the refugees (but not all) seemed skittish around people where were not ethnic Koreans, maybe because of some of the propaganda they’ve been raised with. In any event, it looks like an interesting opportunity, and potentially a way to make lifelong friendships.

See also:

* My most ardent reader sent a link to this interesting from the North, which at least tries to pierce the veil of Pyongyang propaganda monuments.

* Not even Tokyo Rose or Lord Haw Haw would have given us propaganda this hackneyed and loathesome. The fact that writing, thinking, and psychology this hideous have an audience as wide as they do speaks badly of our society.

* “The Taliban takes no responsibility for the killing.” Far too many of us seem to have implicitly accepted this, but that will change if the Taliban carries out its latest threat to kill its South Korean hostages. Only death cults murder innocents in the names of their gods. This should only deepen the world’s contempt for this gang of cultist thugs, these modern-day Ass assins, and be further evidence of the need for us to eradicate it. If Roh Moo Hyun had an ounce of statesmanship in his wrung-out scrotum, he’d publicly promise Hamid Karzai 100 ROK Special Forces for every hostage murdered.

5 Responses

  1. Joshua,

    You already know that President Roh will not dispatch combat troops to go after these killers and it appears he has already caved in to their ransom demands.

    The Korean media is already hard at work framing the hostage crisis into an anti-US issue so if the hostages do get killed the Korean government can blame the US.

    However, if this hostage crisis gets dragged out with more hostages being regularly executed, you may see a change in Korean public sentiment that not even a pacifist leftist like President Roh could ignore. Koreans have more backbone than people give them credit for and may demand a dispatch of ROK combat forces to go after these killers if provoked enough.