People liken Kang Kum Chol, chief of the Kang Ho Yong Youth Shock Brigade of the Chonsong Youth Coal Mine, and his wife Kim Jae Ryon to a “pearl”.
The couple bring up six children including four parentless children.
“It has been said since olden times that 50 000 days’ work is required to bring up a child. Kang and his wife, however, have been devoting much more efforts to the adopted children than their own offspring,” said Kim Hyong Nam, an official of the coal mine.
It has been four years since the couple started to bring up orphaned children.
One day after coming home from work, Kang proposed to his wife to take into their family Un Gil, son of his fellow worker who died at his shock brigade.
“I could not readily make up my mind to do so as it required so much labour to look after my own children,” recalled his wife.
When she once visited her husband, she regretted herself after seeing miners endeavour to do more good things for Un Gil while taking care of him at every break.
Therefore, Kang’s family took in Un Gil for the first and then Jong Hyok, Tae Nam and Mi Hyang one after another, and their family members increased to eight.
But as the saying goes, determination and practice are different things. It was not easy to bring up orphaned children like their own.
“When we adopted them, I was at a loss first how to treat them,” Kim Jae Ryon recollected. “And they also felt it hard to call us ‘father and mother’, felt awkward and did not open their hearts to us. They used to run away from home, so once we had to bring them back, who took their shelter from the rain under the eaves of a house.”
Jae Ryon put her heart into the orphaned children so that they could directly have her maternal love.
The couple bought new clothes for and offered special foods to the adopted children before their own offspring.
Though he was busy doing coal-mining work, Kang was present without fail at the meeting of parents with his children, showed concern for their study and life and prepared birthday tables and souvenirs on their birthdays.
At one time, he broke the river ice and caught fish to stimulate the appetite of Mi Hyang who suffered a cold.
When there were sport meetings in schools, the couple would not go to the school of their own children, but to the school of their adopted children.
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