“My daughter can learn to tie her own hair, button her own clothes, put on her own shoes. She can really become self-sufficient in daily life. Just knowing that she has this potential has given me incredible joy,” exclaimed one mother who participated in IGNIS’ “Journey Towards Joy” training series. This is just one mother’s confession out of a dozen of mothers who have recently completed IGNIS Community’s parent training for raising children with disabilities in South Korea.

Recently, April 20th commemorated the National Disabled Person’s Day in South Korea. This National Day was established in 1991 with the intent of raising public awareness about people with disabilities and as a result promote individual rehabilitation, but it is the parents raising children with disabilities who have to deal with the realities of living with a disability on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, disabled individuals in South Korea still suffer from discrimination and inequality in every sector of Korean society, including opportunities for education and employment. Although South Korea’s medical and rehabilitation system is advanced compared to the North, there still remains much work to be done to support both individuals and families with disabilities.

For this reason, IGNIS Community is proactively engaging with parents raising children with disabilities in both the North and the South. To highlight Korea’s National Day for Disabilities, IGNIS Community is sharing our stories of working with children with disabilities in North Korea. This week’s Sunday is specifically dedicated to the disabled, along with a photo gallery that displays pictures of our medical work and outreach in North Korea. 

In South Korea, up until the 1970’s or 80’s, when children were born with disabilities, most were kept hidden at home. We discovered this similar social atmosphere in North Korea. Children born with behavioral and developmental disorders such as cerebral palsy had few opportunities to receive a proper diagnosis or treatment. Even doctors at the hospital displayed similar attitudes when children showed up with these kinds of symptoms. It’s difficult enough for able-bodied people to thrive, so doctors often tell parents not to let their child suffer needlessly but to let their child go quickly. In North Korea, most children who come to the hospital with disabilities are sent home in this manner. Children end up living alone at home, causing their condition to worsen.

In one way, this has been the only way to deal with a child who is born with a severe disability. Of course, treatment also requires a lot of time and effort, and even so, usually a child will have to live with some aspect of his disability for the rest of his life.

Since our medical outreach in North Korea, our work to save the children of North Korea became more like an obsession rather than a calling. We have had no choice but to fight for these children because it became literally a matter of life and death. The lives of these children and the hopes and despair of their parents depended upon how much we shared in their pain.

By simply helping one child at a time and one family at a time, we have been able to witness lives radically changing.

Thousands of children are now waiting for treatment in North Korea. Cerebral palsy was officially registered as a condition at the Pyongyang Medical School Hospital, and hospitalization for this condition was made possible for the first time ever. In addition, specialty courses in therapeutic treatment for cerebral palsy were created in the medical school. The Department of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine and Chiropractic Specializations were established. On top of these medical programs, Special Education for children with developmental disabilities was also established. Above all, we first coined the term “Pediatric Behavioral and Developmental Disorders” in North Korea. Not only cerebral palsy but also Down Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Intellectual Disability, and twenty-some other disorders are included in developmental disabilities.

Graduates who complete these specialized courses will then be dispatched to provincial hospitals in North Korea to treat and manage patient care. In 2015, with the support from other organizations, Departments in Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine opened not only in Pyongyang but also in three other provincial children’s hospitals in North Korea. The Pyongyang Children’s Hospital also added treatment for children with cerebral palsy after we began training doctors, one of whom transferred her knowledge to that particular Children’s Hospital.

Meanwhile, until the borders re-open for IGNIS Community to return to North Korea, blessings are flowing from the bottom up, starting with families raising children with disabilities. As IGNIS Community equips families through this “Journey Towards Joy” parent training program, South Korean families are identifying closely with the families we work with in the North. IGNIS Community is connecting families’ lives in the South with families in the North. These threads are being woven across the broken divide. In this unique way, it is the weakest of the weak in society that are becoming a critical bridge for reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula. Families with disabilities are paving a rode for healing and peace in Korea in the most unexpected way.