Another American Enters North Korea's Gulags

Robert Park has been "disappeared" into the North Korean gulag system

Robert Park, American missionary

He must have known he was risking death. Quite a thing to do. Most people would just simply say it was a "stupid" thing to do, but he did it because he cares about the North Koreans. No one really does much for them anymore because it is hard to think of what CAN be done, short of storming the country and killing the leaders.
To give an idea of how afraid the North Korean govt is of the bible, there is a group called "Voice of the Martyrs" that floats big square yellow balloons covered in scripture into North Korea via the South Korean border.
When word gets out that there has been a "balloon release", a huge contingent of the North Korean military is mobilized to try and find all the balloons. If it weren't for how horrible North Korea is, I would have a very funny picture in my mind of soldiers scrambling madly in answer to "balloon warning sirens", dashing off to catch balloons.

One of the most famous people ever held in the "revolution zone" of Yodok, 74-year-old Kim Yong-seung, talked about the suffering inflicted on her for the crime of having been a classmate in school and college of Kim Jong-il's long-time mistress, Song Hae-rim, an actress who starred in North Korean films. "I never knew the charge," said Kim Yong-seung, held for nine years in Yodok before her release in 1979.

...prisoners had to get up at 3:30am, get to work in fields or forests or mines by 4:30 am and keep working until nightfall. "Parents and children die there," she said. "We don't have a coffin for the body."

Kim Yong-seung came to know, during months of interrogation before her imprisonment, that her offense was that she had been "a friend of the second wife of Kim Jong-il, and I knew about his private life", but she never faced a court. The need to prevent the slightest knowledge of the Dear Leader's private life was so intense that her closest relatives were also imprisoned. During her years in Yodok she saw both her parents starve to death, one of her sons drown and another son shot while trying to escape. Her husband "disappeared".

The story of the balloons

Covered in the gospel of Mark:

Apparently South Korean Christians also send up other balloons as well. How sneaky, huh? ;O) Just floating stuff into North Korea: