For refugees, “bittersweet” still beats “hell on earth”

I loved this Reuters video of a graduation ceremony for North Korean refugees in Seoul.

LiNK also shares another happy story, about “Danny,” who resettled right here in America, and New Focus International writes about the difficulty many North Koreans have adjusting to the concept of credit in South Korea.

I would concede that for the ten-year period following my own graduation from high school and a background of fairly severe poverty (by American standards), I, too had difficulty adjusting to the concept of credit.

Although I don’t deny the profound psychological barriers between North Koreans and life on the Outer Earth, I sometimes wonder if the much-vaunted difficulty some North Koreans have with that adjustment is exaggerated.  We are speaking of an entire category of 27,000-odd people of all ages, most of whom arrived within a recent five-year period, all of whom are struggling with the same lack of sophistication that all of us also had to outgrow as we pupated into our less-yet-still-slightly cruel world.