THE OTHER WAR IN KOREA
Joy, Dr. Charles R.
The Other War in Korea By Dr. Charles R. Joy MOST of the people of South Korea go to bed hungry every night. Many do not go to bed at all—unless you can call a heap of rags on the sidewalk...
...Readers in a position to help are asked to subscribe through any CARE office, or its national headquarters, 20 Broad Street, New York 5, N. Y...
...But too many of us forget that there are two wars there, not one...
...She said to me: "I cannot close the gate on these little ones, and somehow I have always found a way to provide for them...
...An estimated five million people have been killed or injured since the Communists crossed into South Korea on June 25, 1950—more casualties than America has suffered in all the wars in which it has ever been engaged, and the end is not in sight...
...The orphanages cannot take them in...
...He is home to accelerate the flow of American aid to Korea through food and textile packages...
...There are no figures, though, to measure the unspeakable misery that exists everywhere...
...Joy, noted author and lecturer, has been in Korea [or the past year as Mission Chief of CARE, the nonprofit overseas aid service...
...They wander about until they die, frozen and starving—little children who lost their universe when they lost their parents...
...She has over 600 youngsters at the home...
...On every doorstep in America some Korean baby waits, abandoned and forgotten because of this cruel war...
...You want figures...
...Those are some of the grim facts of the human tragedy war has wrought in Korea...
...Total relief aid contributed through both governmental and private voluntary agencies is tragically inadequate for the enormous need in this stricken land, where 2,500,000 refugees wait in vain for a chance to return to their old homes...
...Yet every morning she goes to the orphanage gate and listens for a baby's cry, for often in the night some poor mother leaves her infant on the steps...
...Many do not go to bed at all—unless you can call a heap of rags on the sidewalk or a straw mat in some alley a bed...
...And for that second waf—the war against human misery—we are spending far too little...
...there is no other shelter for them...
...The superintendent of the Taegu City Children's Home is a woman who loves children, though she has none of her own...
...We cannot shut our eyes and our ears and expect that baby to disappear...
...The free world is spending some $5 billion a year to fight aggression in Korea...
...where an additional 4,000,000 people have been plunged into wretched poverty...
...Among these homeless are thousands of young children...
...They wait, as Korea waits, to see whether the gate to our hearts will be opened...
...Half the population, some ten million persons, are dependent on relief because they are refugees who have lost their homes and lands...
...where 3,500,000 war sufferers who have lost their houses, or their limbs, or the husbands and sons who were their mainstay, wonder if the future holds any hope for them...
Vol. 17 • March 1953 • No. 3
