And the wall came down
1989 was a year of celebration for me as my oldest daughter, Atlanta was born, albeit reluctantly; it took her two days to make the transition from womb to world but she arrived healthy and happy to be cherished by her parents and brother. It was also a year of celebration for all freedom fighters throughout the world because in that same year the Berlin Wall, die Berliner Mauer, came down and the country of Germany began its reunification. This constructed barrier completely encircled West Berlin, separating it from East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Erected in 1961, it was a physical representation of the Iron Curtain; the ideological and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of WW11 in 1945 until the end of the Cold War 1991. During its 28 year life, over 100 people were killed, trying to cross the Wall into West Berlin. Unfortunately Germany was not the last remaining country in the world to be reunified. Today, twenty years on, Korea is still a divided country; the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK in the North and the Republic of Korea, ROK, in the South. The War the Korean people suffered from 1950-1953 was colloquially named by the Western world as The Forgotten War, because it was not a victory and has culturally been forgotten. While the civilians and combatants of a war will never forget it, neither must the rest of the world. The writer Maya Angelou said ‘History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.’ Long before there were geographical and ideological divisions, the Korean people had a rich tradition of folktales, embodying their cultural values. These tales live on today.
Brotherly Love
A long, long time ago, there lived two brothers. They were both very poor, but the older brother had a little more rice than the other one. However, he had a larger family to support than his younger brother. In autumn they each harvested their crops and bagged up the grain. But the older brother was worried about his younger brother and so when it was dark he took a bag of grain and secretly placed it in his brother’s rice store.
Strange to say the following day when the older brother went to his own store, he counted the same number of bags as he had before he took the bag to his brother. So the next night he took another bag and put it in his brother’s storehouse, exactly as he had done before.
But when he checked his store the next morning once again there was the same amount of bags. His supply had not diminished at all. The brother was puzzled. “How could this be?”
The following evening he took another bag of rice to his brother’s grain store, but instead of going home to bed, he waited behind a bush near his own store. A little while later he saw a figure coming through the darkness, carrying a sack. When he saw it was his younger brother he was very surprised.
For each night the younger brother had taken a bag of rice and put it in his older brother’s store because he was worried about him. When the two brothers realized what they had been doing they laughed and laughed. They now knew that they were not poor at all because they had something more precious than sacks of rice... they had brotherly love. (reprinted from my book Tell Me: Storytelling as a Global Language)
Photo by Roman W Schatz
