While cooking my grandmother’s famous chicken and noodles and mashed potatoes to go with, I couldn’t help but reminisce about the Thanksgivings we spent in Pyongyang. One of the privileges we had from living over ten years in North Korea was celebrating the holidays with our North Korean counterparts. Being the only Americans for miles around, we often lured in our North Korean friends to celebrate American holidays with us. From Halloween to Easter, our family intentionally kept American traditions alive while living in North Korea.

Since no other neighbors were around, for Halloween our kids dressed up in home-made costumes and ran back and forth between our North Korean guide’s lodging and our own until all candy was exhausted. Thankfully, pumpkins could be found in North Korea, not the large variety, but at least a variety of pumpkin that allowed our kids to carve their own jack-o-lanterns. We melted down chocolate and made home-made caramel with brown sugar and butter to create the most delicious, candied apples. Fall festivities were only the beginning as we geared up to celebrate the harvest.

When it came to Thanksgiving, everything had to be made from scratch. For the most part, turkey was not readily available, so we made due with chicken. Another teammate and myself would take the entire day off from work to do the cooking, usually starting the afternoon the day before. Pumpkin and apple pie, bread stuffing, mashed potatoes with chicken gravy, green bean casserole with onion ring snack crumbling on top, as long as we could find the ingredients, we made it. We didn’t spare any traditional food if we could help it.

Just like the first Thanksgiving, we took to heart the meaning of the holiday by celebrating it with our newly found friends in a foreign land. Native Americans had taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn and survive the winter, and as both groups experienced heartache and suffering from disease, that first Thanksgiving was a time to celebrate just being alive.

We, too, had learned much from our North Korea counterparts. North Koreans were experts at sifting rice, but when we got there we were not. The first few times I tried, it took me about an hour each time to sift the rice before cooking a meal. That was just the sifting time. Add the other prep and cooking time and each meal took no less than two hours to fully prepare! North Koreans prepare their rice by swishing it in cold water in two specially grooved bowls, back and forth from one grooved bowl to the other. There’s a real art to the process. Being denser and heavier, rocks in the rice get stuck in the grooves. Once bit by bit all the rocks are painstakingly removed this way, the rice can be given a final wash and then cooked at long last. (Excerpt from Discovering Joy: Ten Years in North Korea)

Our first Thanksgiving in Pyongyang was intentionally celebrated with a few doctors from the Pyongyang Medical School Hospital. We were developing a Spine Rehabilitation Center on the hospital campus and treating children with developmental disabilities in a small treatment room measuring about 2 square meters in size. This included training doctors in Pediatric Rehabilitation while developing a specialized hospital for children with behavioral and developmental disorders, including cerebral palsy and autism. As it stands now, the Spine Rehabilitation Center is the largest pediatric rehabilitation center in North Korea. It can accommodate about 450 outpatients per day and 40 inpatients, including their guardians. The building itself is five-stories high, in addition to a basement.

Ground-breaking treatment for children with disabilities would not have been possible without the North Korean doctors standing by our side. They navigated the local medical system for us, selected medical graduate students as trainees for our new specialty programs, and made working with local patients possible. Just as the Native Americans had taught the Pilgrims how to survive, we, too, were making it in the Pyongyang medical school system thanks to our North Korean counterparts.

On that first Thanksgiving Day in Pyongyang, we had a lot to celebrate. Ignis Community was treating for the first time patients with cerebral palsy. It was not an easy process. And at the time, we still had a long road ahead of us, but we took the time to give thanks with the North Korean doctors.

I cannot recall that the Koreans actually enjoyed the food. It must have tasted unfamiliar and foreign to them. But I do remember the sentiment around the table. We all took turns giving thanks for our blessings, including our North Korean guests. An as a result, our time together will forever be imprinted upon my memories.

Now that North Korea’s borders have been closed and the country is experiencing a shortage in supplies, we wonder how our North Korean doctors are doing. Have they harvested enough for this coming year? Are they able to give thanks during these difficult, pandemic times? Perhaps they, too, are recalling times of joy and thanksgiving that one November day years ago when our family lived in Pyongyang.