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Maryknoll humanitarian trumps politics in North Korea
Real estate news By The Journal News
October 3, 2007
The South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, walked across the center of the demilitarized zone on his way to Pyongyang yesterday, for only the second summit between the leaders of the two Koreas. Roh and the reclusive North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, are meeting for three days of talks that were expected to yield aid for the North. The Rev. Gerard E. Hammond knows the trip well. The Maryknoll missioner has traveled to North Korea approximately 30 times, bringing medical supplies and farm equipment to ease the poverty there. He crosses in a convoy of perhaps 10 cars, a Jeep leading the way, through the South Korean checkpoint and to the middle of the DMZ. "There's a North Korean Jeep waiting on the other side," he said. "And the South Korean Jeep turns around and then they signal us to come forward."
It is odd to think of a Roman Catholic priest in one of the world's most closed places. If events turned only on politics, he might not be there, he acknowledged. But he believes his long service in Korea - he has lived there for 47 years - helped to open the way for him. Plus the head of the foundation he works with, the EugeneBell Foundation, had been a translator for the Rev. Billy Graham and through him met Kim Jong Il. At first, the foundation, a non-sectarian aid group named after a Presbyterian missionary, sent food after disastrous floods in 1993 and 1994. Today, Hammond, 74, and others bring tuberculosis medication and surgical kits, tractors, greenhouses and seeds to two provinces in the West. The equipment is simple, X-ray machines without computers to accommodate the scarcity of electricity, wheelbarrows and greenhouses, items brought in and shipped from South Korea so that replacement parts can be procured.
News of North Korea alternates between its alarming nuclear program, the cult surrounding the "Dear Leader," Kim Jung Il, and the terrible famines that sweep the country. "At times of hunger - when the rice has gone and all the dogs and cats have been eaten - North Korean children scavenge the fields of crows, dragonflies and rats," begins an article from the Times of London published in October 2006, when North Korea shocked the world with a nuclear explosion. Hammond, who lived in Pleasantville as a child and who spoke about Korea this week while at the Maryknoll headquarters in Ossining, also talks about the desperate deprivation. But he focuses as much on the minutiae of saving lives.
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