Former aid worker reflects on operating in authoritarian countries

Christy Gavitt gives a talk at KOTE in downtown Seoul's Insa-dong, Oct. 24. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu

By Bereket Alemayehu

Christy Gavitt shot about 2,700 photos on 75 rolls of film during her six-month stay in North Korea in 1998 and 1999. She was there with the Private Voluntary Organization Consortium (PVOC), an NGO supervising food-for-work programs all across the isolated nation.

"First, I would ask the permission of our guides, 'Is it OK if I take this?' And then after a while, I just took pictures, and was never stopped," she said in a talk given for Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) Korea at KOTE in downtown Seoul, Oct. 24. "There was the internet, but no Facebook, no smartphones, or anything like that. In fact, I took my first digital photograph in North Korea, of all places."

Her photos were taken mostly for documentation purposes at rural worksites such as rice field embankments undergoing construction, but they also show the people she met and the scenery around them.

One day at a worksite, she discovered the lens cap from her camera was missing. "I casually mentioned this to the site manager who proceeded to grab a number of his colleagues and start frantically searching for the missing cap," she said. "It was quite muddy, and I asked them not to worry about it ― I could just use a hanky to protect my lens ― but they persisted. I finally had to beseech them to stop looking. They were so apologetic."

Gavitt was on a team of six relief workers sent to North Korea to inspect worksites and make sure donated food was reaching the intended recipients. She visited around 60 sites throughout the country multiple times and met at least 300 local government officials in the course of these visits.

After her visit ended, she returned once again to train the next team of U.S. relief workers.

"Soon after my return, I went to one of the old sites of the original 60, as they had just completed their embankments," she said. "The local government official was justifiably proud of the work and approached me, grinning ear to ear. He extended his hand and I grasped it. As he shook my hand, I felt something hard between his palm and mine. As our hands separated, I looked down ... and there was the missing lens cap! I was at a complete loss for words. So the two of us just grasped hands and wildly laughed. And it was a good thing we were laughing so hard, because I burst into tears from just the emotion of the moment. The officials in this village had no idea that I would be returning to North Korea, and yet they preserved this small plastic lens cap, probably worth $1, for over five months, just in case I came back."

She added that the lens cap now sits on her desk at home, "as a constant reminder that astounding acts of thoughtfulness can shine a brilliant light, even for a very short time, across politically hostile borders."

The retired global health consultant shared this anecdote during her talk, titled “Reflections on providing aid in North Korea and other authoritarian settings,” while she was in Korea for a Peace Corps Revisit program.

Gavitt had originally stayed in the South from 1974 to 1976, working at a middle school in South Chungcheong Province teaching English. After that, she had a year-long internship with CARE Korea. She went on to work overseas in international relief and development programs for 32 years, 19 of those with CARE USA. Her assignments included emergency programs in Pakistan, Somalia, Chad, Mozambique, Somaliland and Rwanda. After 2000, she managed HIV and AIDS programs and mother-child health programs in Mali, Togo, Namibia and Tanzania. After returning to the United States, she worked for over five years as a senior health coordinator with the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C.

Christy Gavitt, left, is introduced by RAS Korea Vice President Suzanne Crowder Han, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, at KOTE in downtown Seoul, Oct. 24. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu

Decades after her initial time in South Korea, her Korean language experience came in useful when she was sent back to Korea, but this time to the North.

When Gavitt arrived in North Korea, it was near the end of the Arduous March, a period of famine in the North that began in 1993 which killed an unknown amount of North Koreans, at least hundreds of thousands.

"Given my experience and my knowledge of Korean, I was recruited to join a team of six American relief workers sent to North Korea to manage a project involving the rehabilitation of rice field embankments that had been flattened during the floods," she told the audience, which included a number of other Peace Corps volunteers, some in town for the revisit, and a few others who never left. "Our small team traveled to the sites daily, doing estimates of the number of cubic meters of earth that would be needed to rehabilitate a given embarkment, which was then translated into a certain amount of U.S.-sourced food to be distributed to the workers as the works progressed."

She said she was always welcomed warmly wherever she traveled throughout the country, always followed by minders. "They expressed their gratitude for the food provided from the U.S.," she said. "This from a country with whom the U.S. is technically still at war with.”

She emphasized the priorities of NGOs providing humanitarian aid in countries with authoritarian governments. NGOs must do everything to increase the likelihood that the most vulnerable receive the allocated aid, she explained, while concurrently liaising and coordinating with central and especially regional and local government officials.

“I think in any authoritarian setting, you've got to have a team," she said. "The team can be small, preferably the team knows the language. The minders were very influential. They can observe the local conditions and convey the observations to the central government. Having our minders when we traveled to the field sounds like a burden, but I enjoyed their company during those field trips. Having them out in the field was absolutely critical. And it's likely that they were reporting back on not only our conversations, but also what was happening in the field.”

Afterward, in the question-and-answer period, one audience member asked if Gavitt had been able to stay in touch with anyone in North Korea. She answered that this had been impossible, but she introduced a young member in the audience, North Korean defector Maeng Hyo-shim, with whom she had struck up a friendship, meeting each other multiple times on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Maeng, now a third-year university student, told The Korea Times afterward that the lecture was an important historical documentation based on Gavitt's personal experiences. “It was fantastic, I like it, though I wasn’t born during that time but I heard many similar stories. That time was very difficult and many people died of starvation,” she said.

North Korean defector Maeng Hyo-shim and Christy Gavitt pose for a photo at KOTE in downtown Seoul's Insa-dong, Oct. 24. Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu

RAS Korea is the world’s oldest Korean studies organization, founded in 1900. Its activities are focused on a regular program of lectures and cultural excursions, as well as special interest groups and books, including the annual journal Transactions. The next lecture will be on Nov. 7, with Don Baker giving a talk titled “Why Were They Arrested? Religious Leaders and the Gwangju Democratization Movement." Visit raskb.com for more information.

Bereket Alemayehu is an Ethiopian photo artist, social activist and writer based in Seoul. He's also co-founder of Hanokers, a refugee-led social initiative, and freelance contributor for Pressenza Press Agency.