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 Fifty years after the end of the Korean War, relations between the two nations occupying the Korean peninsula remain brittle. As a step toward reconciliation—and ending the chronic food shortage in the north—a coalition of South Korean citizen groups and corporations recently sent the first of three large shipments of rice to their hungry North Korean neighbors. Dubbed “Rice of Peace,” the shipments are expected to feed a total of 20,000 North Korean children for three months.
“It is the children who pay the price of political games,” said Sam Park, director of World Vision’s program in Korea. “We need to keep them alive, encouraged and hopeful so that they themselves can become agents of peace.”
World Vision Korea will be responsible for distributing the rice. The first shipment—500 tons—sailed from Inchon on August 13. Additional shipments of 1,000 tons and 500 tons will be delivered in September and October.
World Vision Korea operates a dozen major projects in Korea. These focus on education, maximizing the potential of existing resources, community networking, counseling and income generation. One project, “Love Lunch Box,” aims to feed children and elderly people living in low-income households.
Nearly half of Korean churches in the United States have donated relief supplies to ease the famine in North Korea, and most Korean Americans consider sending humanitarian aid to be a stepping stone toward normalizing relations between North and South Korea.
Since 1996, Korean American individuals and church groups have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to World Vision famine-relief efforts in Korea.
The fact that so many Korean Americans have taken an active interest in this cause comes as no surprise to Rev. Ben C. Song, a World Vision volunteer and retired pastor of the Federal Way Mission Church, a predominantly Korean-American church in Federal Way, near Seattle WA.
“The political atmosphere (in Korea) may have changed, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are still blood relatives,” he said. “Those who are older—who experienced the Korean War—are especially compassionate, because we lived through it.”
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