British Embassy re-launches English program for NK defectors

"I was just looking at the face of the professor during the entire class hour because I couldn't understand so many English terms," said Jang Eun-mi, originally a North Korean now living and studying in South Korea after defecting from the communist country a few years ago.

Leaving behind her family in the North, the 29-year-old woman who goes by the alias defected from the impoverished North in search of freedom and opportunities in South Korea, and is now studying business administration at a South Korean college.

"There are so many English words, and it is very essential in the university, especially for a business major," Jang said. Back in the North, students were not taught English because the communist country hates America, she said.

A flurry of enigmatic English business terms in the class led her to start studying English two years ago, and now she "fully" understands them, she said.

"Two years ago I started to study English in order to survive ... now it is to achieve my dream in the future," she said, adding she wants to help people suffering under the North Korean dictatorship and help achieve the unification of the two Koreas in a peaceful way.

Jang is one of 74 North Korean defectors, mostly young refugees, who benefited from the English education program run by the British Embassy in Seoul last year.

After first launching the "English for the Future" program in 2011, the embassy has accepted 65 more North Korean defectors for the second round of the English language program for 2012.

The free-of-charge program intended for North Korean defectors in the South was designed to help refugees from the North smoothly assimilate into South Korean society by teaching the international language, widely deemed here as one of the essential qualifications for success.

"New settlers of North Korean origins often feel nervous and isolated and having not had opportunities and resources to access to such (English) educational opportunities," Hugo Swire, the minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Britain, said in the event organized to launch the 2012 program in the embassy building in Seoul.

That is why the embassy is setting up the program "to help them, equipping them with skills that can help realize their potential and integrate them into this dynamic society," Swire said.

North defectors still encounter social misunderstanding here and have concerns for the safety of their loved ones remaining in the North. The number of North Korean refugees is now reaching 24,000 in the South, Seoul's Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik said in a speech during the event.

The minister often tells them they "do not need fear but to have confidence in themselves and never give up on their hopes and dreams." (Yonhap)