Why is lived experience so important in our work?

The lived experience of our North Korean staff and volunteers ensures a bond and a trust with the escaped people taking part in our programmes that cannot be replicated with someone who has not shared the horrors of growing up in an authoritarian regime, does not understand how much courage it takes to attempt escape, does not know the loneliness of having found freedom but at the price of leaving your family, or the isolation of arriving in a new country where you don’t understand the language and don’t know where you fit in.