2023 Korean Diaspora DMZ Peace Pilgrimage

A Letter from Kurt Esslinger and Hyeyoung Lee, serving in Korea

Summer 2023

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Dear friends,

“It was very moving to hear each other’s stories, as members of the Korean diaspora community, regarding how division has impacted our lives. Each one of us has very unique yet united stories that connect us together. These powerful stories need to be lifted up in order for us to reflect on how we live our lives, working for peace in the Korean Peninsula.” This is from one of the participants of the 2023 Korean Diaspora DMZ Peace Pilgrimage (in short, the Peace Pilgrimage) that was organized by mission co-workers living in Korea, including myself. 

The purpose of the Peace Pilgrimage was to invite the Korean diaspora community, members of which have left Korea for various reasons and live all over the world, to share the impact and meaning that division has had in their communities. We organized the trip to visit the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) areas including Goseong, Cheorwon, and Ganghwa-do to physically see the border with North Korea and walk alongside the DMZ area to pray for peace on the Korean Peninsula. There were 22 participants and four staff members from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, the United States and Korea. 

The program included stories from each community living outside of Korea. We heard from people living in Kazakhstan, China, the USA and Japan. Even though they presented their own perspectives and family stories, the thing that resonated most for me was that the stories are all intertwined, and we all are connected. The division of Korea has impacted each one of our lives in one way or another. Discussing how to promote peace and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula can be very challenging because we have different understandings of the division and different attitudes on how to approach this topic. However, we all agreed that we need to continue working towards peace and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula in order to deal with the pain and struggles that we face as Korean descendants. We also talked about the impact of division not only on the Korean people but around the world. In addition, we talked about how having this shared, painful history can give us an opportunity to be empathetic to other communities where there are many similar unhealed wounds. In order to do this, we also need to think beyond the boundaries and use our creative imagination to be more inclusive and hospitable to people around us. 

Being able to walk alongside the DMZ area and seeing North Korea from a short distance produced very moving and impactful moments for the participants. We visited the unification observatory in Goseong, we walked up to the Soi Mountain in Cheorwon, and went to the small island of GangHwa where we can see part of North Korea with our bare eyes. It was almost painful to see that North Korea is so close, yet too far. It is a painful reality that we cannot freely travel to the other side of Korea, where some of our participants were born and some of our relatives are still living. In each place we visited, we stopped to pray and sing for peace and share some silent moments to reflect on what I, as an individual, and what we, as a community, can do for the peace and reconciliation of the Korean Peninsula. This simple ritual gave us a moment to think and connect with one another.

We concluded our program by reflecting on our time together for the last four days. We asked these four questions to the participants: What have we learned? What touched our hearts? What’s left on my lap? What am I taking with me? Each participant took their time to reflect on these questions and wrote down their answers on sticky notes. As they shared their reflections, we asked each participant to help stitch back together the fabric that we tore during opening worship. In this way, we brought together those two pieces of fabric as a symbolic action, enacting the reunification of Korea. When the reflection was over, we held the united fabric together and sang, “Our Wish is Reunification.” We ended our time with a community dance, all of us wishing for the divided country to be one, using the song “We Are One.”

This four-day trip to the DMZ, and learning from one another, might not provide an immediate change. I believe that we are planting a seed in people’s minds to long for peace and reconciliation in Korea. Being able to see the reality and learning about the painful history, through people who actually lived through the history, was very moving. Many participants have mentioned that this trip provided them with a new way to look at the reality of the division and a new vision of how to become a peacemaker in our daily lives. As always, where there is conflict there is also peace. It is our choice whether we continue to encourage conflict or help build peace. I hope that this DMZ peace pilgrimage provided a space for us to contemplate and think again about what choices we make in our daily lives. 

Hyeyoung and Kurt