Liberty in North Korea: Drawing North Korean relatives - Writing Wednesday
Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,
Today, I'll be talking about a beautiful video that was made for the channel, Liberty in North Korea.
Liberty in North Korea is a worldwide movement that works alongside the people of North Korea, to aid them in reaching freedom safely. They aim to do this by protecting defectors hiding in China, helping to rescue refugees through a modern-day underground railroad through Southeast Asia, and raising a deeper understanding of North Korea with ordinary people across the world. Since North Korea has been a fairly closed country for about 70 years, due to the Kim dynasty and the reign of Kim Jong-un, many refugees have not seen their family for years as they've become completely isolated from them. They can't call, text, or visit them, and due to the harsh communist regime of North Korea, many hardly know if they're loved ones are still alive. Liberty in North Korea innovatively set out to change that.
I've seen artists draw people from descriptions before. I know that the police have trained artists to do that so that they can catch criminals based purely on the witness's description of them. However, I've rarely seen it used in this sense before as police artists nowadays often use computer graphics to generate an image, whereas the artists in the video were drawing completely by hand and they were brought in to draw some of the relatives of the North Korean defectors. The people chose who they would like to have drawn and they were given a moment to think about them so that they could clearly picture them. Then, once they had a clear image of their relative in mind, they began depicting what they looked like so that the artist could begin drawing them. They called out clear features like the face shape, their nose, their eyes, and similarities with their own faces so that the artist had a good idea of what they looked like.
I never once would have thought that an artist who was drawing a real person, completely blind and ignorant of what they looked like, would be able to accurately draw a portrait of them. However, these artists did and it brought tears to these North Koreans because, whilst they still couldn't physically see their relatives, they at least couldn't forget them because they had a drawing to remember them by. Often when you're not around someone for that length of time, you start to lose the image of them in your mind and that can be really scary. I know that blind people experience something similar to this when they forget what their favourite colour looks like, after not being able to see it for so long. However, I'm happy that these North Koreans have a solid memory to keep because even if it doesn't solve everything, it's still very precious because of the good memories it keeps hold of.
I do hope that some day, North Koreans can live as freely as we do. We hardly know what is happening in this secretive country but it is highly likely that many travesties have occurred. As we are trying to come out of our own isolation because of lockdown and as we're slowly returning to our normal lives, we must remember that some people live in isolation for all their life. This drawing session hosted by Liberty in North Korea is a stepping stone to a better relationship with North Korea and I do hope that people living in the darkness in this country, do eventually see the light again.
Liberty in North Korea
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