If they are stopped, he warns, only the two who are fluent in Chinese should speak. They are to identify themselves as shepherds accompanying foreign scientists studying "desertification" of the plain. They are en route to their house down the road. They are to gripe that the researchers aren't paying them enough.
"I've had to lie ever since I met you guys," Chun jokes, acknowledging his mission's moral compromises and small payoff. Experience has taught him that assimilation is difficult and that if they make it to the South, these North Koreans will likely be trading one form of misery for another: Most won't work; won't help others escape; won't go to church or pray. They'll squander their money on gambling and booze.
"They always cry in front of me before they go," Chun says. "They say, 'I'll live the rest of my life for Him.' But they always forget it."
They may do far worse and report him to authorities. One missionary, Kim Dong Shik of Lynchburg, Va., has disappeared and there is speculation that he was kidnapped by North Korean police.
"You never know which one will betray you," Chun says.
Defections on Rise
War split the Korean peninsula half a century ago, dividing millions of families. North and South are technically still at war, and their border is the most heavily militarized in the world. Despite its fitful expressions of interest in reform and rapprochement, North Korea remains one of the most closed societies on Earth.
Until a few years ago, at most a few dozen North Koreans managed to defect to the South each year.
But Chun and others like him have led hundreds to freedom by taking them first in the opposite direction, into the Chinese hinterlands. Their motivation is Christian charity as well as a yearning to reunite the Korean peninsula.
Thanks largely to the efforts of Chun and other activists, 583 defectors showed up in Seoul last year, nearly double the number that arrived in 2000. At least 838 have arrived so far this year, a few at a time.
Chun got involved after visiting China in August 1999, when he saw a North Korean woman being sold as a bride to a Chinese man while her husband stood helpless. He also met a young girl who woke up one morning to find that her mother and sister had been sold, leaving her to beg in the streets.
"I could not erase the sense of helplessness of that man and young girl who saw their families sold right before their eyes," he recalled. "It tormented me."
