In my hands I hold freedom
In my hands I hold two things….
In the left is a soldier’s hat, slightly faded, olive green, and with a red band around the top.
In the right is a pair of soldier’s boots, uncomfortable, simply made of hard rubber, and appears to fit someone the size of a small teenage boy.
Now some may struggle with finding any emotions while looking, wearing, or holding such items. To me they represent years of suffering, a firm suppressive grip on a beautiful culture, and reason to keep pressing on.
It wasn’t till we presented these items to a refugee that I gained a new perspective of them. To a refugee named Shin, a man who spent his entire life in a North Korean prison camp, these items represented both a sense of fear and wonder. Having been born, raised, starved, tortured and emotionally deprived in a concentration camp, for a reason he’ll never know why, these items were something that were so far out of reach.
When he picked up the hat he said he felt a sense of fear, holding an item that he had never been so close to and only feared from afar, he put the hat on and wore it around the office impersonating a soldier. After picking up the boots, Shin explained that he was forced to make them while he lived inside a barbed wire and fortified world.
It wasn’t till Shin sat these items down and walked away from them that I realized the lack of freedom they represented and the simple freedoms we all have. Having once feared them and been forced to create them, Shin now had the littlest freedom to simply just walk away….. to leave them behind and not have to fear them anymore…..and to this account, I hope LiNK can continue to press forward and bring these freedoms to the refugees we find.
For these simple freedoms can make life worth living for…
Learn more about Shin here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4NIB6xroc
