Dozens of women clad casually in sweatsuits chat cheerfully in their classroom during a recess period.
It could be any classroom except for the tight security outside and the subject of the lectures — how to adapt to life in a new world.
The South Korean government’s Hanawon resettlement centre, ringed with fences and tightly guarded by police, is the first stop for North Koreans who have fled their impoverished hardline communist homeland.
At the centre south-east of Seoul, the refugees — more than 60% of whom are women — learn how to survive in an affluent capitalist democracy which often looks down on them as troublesome poor relations.
Sometimes they even struggle to understand what Southerners — with a different accent and many borrowed foreign words — are saying.
“They are all sick, mentally and physically,” Hanawon chief Ko Gyoung-Bin said at the centre, which provides two months of basic job training, information on South Korea and lessons in survival skills — such as buying a subway ticket, opening a bank acount and using a credit card.
Hanawon spends half its medical expenses on false teeth because many refugees have lost molars to malnutrition, Ko told Agence-France Presse in a rare media interview.
About 10% of new arrivals suffer from contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, he said.
They are also mentally vulnerable, worried about relatives left behind and debts to brokers who arranged their escape. Ko said about 20% need psychological treatment after graduating from their mandatory stay at Hanawon.
More than 15Â 000 refugees have escaped and come to South Korea since the end of the 1950 to 1953 war, the vast majority in recent years.
During the Cold War era they were treated as heroes. When the trickle became a flood as the North’s food shortages worsened, the welcome from the general public grew colder.
Since its opening in 1999, the centre has been remodelled twice and doubled its capacity to 600 last December.
It will introduce a three-month programme in March, focusing on better psychological counselling and practical training or education at work sites.
But Ko said this will still be inadequate to prepare the northerners for the shock of having to stand on their own feet.
Finding stable jobs is the toughest part of adjusting to life in South Korea where discrimination against defectors is widespread, he said.
“Along with concerns about their family members in North Korea, one of the most difficult things they have to cope with in South Korea is bias,” Ko said.
“They have to respect themselves and take pride. They are not dropouts but survivors who have overcome difficulties to come here.”
Photographs and interviews are banned at Hanawon for security reasons and Ko requested its location not be published. But refugees interviewed outside the centre backed up his views.
“Before coming to South Korea I had high expectations and hopes. There are no regrets but I’m not so happy,” said Kim Un-Hee (33) who left Hanawon six months ago.
“South Koreans treat me like a foreigner. That makes me hard to adjust to life outside Hanawon. Everything is so different,” said Kim, who has a husband and son in the North.
“At the beginning I tried to find jobs in restaurants but I was shunned because I came from North Korea. I was treated as a destitute person from a poor country. They looked down on me, hurting my pride.”
Kim now works at a paper box factory where she earns about 800Â 000 won ($575) a month. She said this is far less than South Korean colleagues.
Kim, who must send money through unofficial channels to relatives in the North, called for more intensive training for better-paid jobs.
“I’m under stress from interacting with people because the culture, social system and other things are all different,” she said. “People here use foreign words too much.”
A survey last year by a rights group found only 45% of refugees have jobs, many of them temporary.
Employment difficulties drive some defectors into crime, said Park Sun-Yo (42) who fled to South Korea in 2006 after almost a decade living with a Chinese-Korean man in China.
“I was almost broke when I left Hanawon because the broker who helped my defection collected seven million won ($5Â 000) from me,” she said.
“To work at small restaurants I had to pass myself off as an ethnic Korean from China because of the negative perception about us.”
Park said some refugees quit jobs because they cannot adjust to the competitive atmosphere at workplaces.
“There is a wrong perception that we are troublemakers and cannot easily adapt to society. South Koreans must be patient and wait for us to settle smoothly.”
The government in 2005 changed its payments to refugees to encourage them to seek jobs.
Lump-sum payments were cut to 20-million won from 36-million and monthly assistance to 340Â 000 won from 528Â 000. Refugees still get cheap public housing but cash incentives were introduced for job training.
Ko said refugees need to understand that the South is not a paradise. But equally South Koreans must stop treating the new arrivals as “poor neighbours”, he said.
“They are not needy people but people who have risked their lives for a better future.” – AFP