A Georgia non-profit group on Nov. 11 broke ground in North Korea on a project aimed at building homes and harmony in the reclusive Asian nation.
With help from U.S. volunteers, the Americus-based Fuller Center for Housing will work with the North Korean government to construct a 50-unit complex in a small farming community outside the capital city of Pyongyang.
The project will help alleviate a housing shortage caused by a 2006 typhoon that destroyed some 30,000 homes across the country.
North Korea is providing land, labor and heavy equipment for the project, a community of duplexes designed with a variety of measures to boost energy efficiency.
For example, the homes will have a wall of windows on the front. Facing south will allow in the most possible sunlight, reducing the use of electricity to light the homes, said David Snell, the Fuller center's president.
The Paektusan Academy of Architecture, a government agency responsible for developing much of modern Pyongyang's cityscape, designed the complex and will manage construction.
The two-bedroom, one-bathroom floor plans include a living room, dining room and an animal shed with multiple stalls on the back of the house. An upper-level attic space is designated as a "greenhouse" on a design posted on the Fuller center Web site.
The center is raising money for the homes from U.S. and European donors. Construction is slated to start in the spring, and the center will begin sending teams of six to eight American volunteers next summer.
Despite many Americans' negative perceptions of North Korea, the center has started receiving volunteer applications before even officially opening the process, Mr. Snell said.
"The fact that it's been a forbidden kingdom for all these years adds to the intrigue," he told GlobalAtlanta.
Mr. Snell, who traveled to North Korea for the third time in the last 18 months to attend the groundbreaking, added that the center's main mission is to build houses, but it often ends up bridging cultural divides in the conflict-ridden areas where it works.
"Absence of peace seems to be a common thread, so we're starting to wonder if maybe we have a peacemaking component to our mission," said Mr. Snell, who stopped in the Philippines and Peru to kick-start projects on his way home from North Korea.
Mr. Snell hopes to have an impact on relations between the U.S. and North Korea at a grassroots level. The nations are currently at odds over a raft of diplomatic issues, most notably North Korea's evolving nuclear weapons program and belligerent antics on the international stage that befuddle American policy makers.
Such political differences won't heal until people trust each other, and the housing project will give both countries' citizens a chance to meet and work together for common good, Mr. Snell said.
"We all demonize our enemies, but I'm finding the Korean people to be just like you and me. We chuckle and laugh and tell stories, and they have the same aspirations for a better life and for peace," Mr. Snell said. "This notion that we're bringing peace is shared notion."
The entire project has so far been an exercise in building trust. The idea came from Don Mosley, who heads Jubilee Partners, a refugee resettlement organization outside of Athens, and Han Park, an international affairs professor at the University of Georgia who has become a trusted unofficial liaison between the two countries.
Dr. Park has traveled to North Korea more than 40 times in the past 20 years. He visited the country on a scholarly trip in July and met with government officials as American journalists Lisa Ling and Euna Lee were being detained for allegedly committing "hostile acts" toward the country by filming a documentary with North Korean defectors along the country's border with China.
Dr. Park had no official role in the negotiations concerning their release but at the time said he aimed to facilitate communication between the countries.
The women were tried and sentenced to 12 years in a hard labor camp, but were eventually released after former President Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea and met with leader Kim Jong Il.
Dr. Park's relationships with government officials have helped the Fuller center, a Christian organization, build legitimacy with a Communist regime that is still wary of interaction with the outside world, Mr. Snell said.
"Trust is a big issues for the Koreans. They've had a very troubled history and they've been subjected to some real unhappy international interventions," he said, citing the 35 years that the Japanese held Korea under a brutal colonization that ended in 1945 and the intense fighting in North Korea during the Korean War in the 1950s.
Kim Il Sung, the first supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, established Juche, a philosophy that focuses on self-reliance in national defense, economics and development.
Years later, that ideology still results in the country being shrouded behind a wall of isolation, Mr. Snell said.
"They're a totally closed society. There's no Internet, no outside television or radio or papers, so the people have no way of knowing what's going on outside their border," he said.
The government also tightly controls where people live and their employment. It's very difficult for foreigners to gain access to the country. Mr. Snell had to go through Beijing to get his North Korean visa. The government performed thorough background checks before letting him in.
Once he got there, his interpreters, who also served as government handlers, asked "questions that indicate they know more about us than we know about them," he said.
But on three trips, Mr. Snell has progressively seen the walls soften. Traveling alone last year, he was able to meet with farmers, the types of people who will live in the Fuller center's houses. The November trip, joined by Mr. Mosley, Dr. Park and Fuller center board Chairman LeRoy Troyer, was even more open.
"We have this developing trust that we want to keep enhancing that sort of changes the dynamic every time we go," Mr. Snell said.
The Fuller Center for Housing was established in 2005 by Habitat for Humanity International founder Millard Fuller. The late Mr. Fuller was fired in February 2005 from Habitat, which he started in Americus and ran for 29 years. Habitat is now based in Atlanta and has not worked in North Korea, according to a list of projects on its Web site.
Mr. Snell, a longtime Habitat employee, helped found the Fuller center and became its president when Mr. Fuller died in February.
Opening doors in a closed country is new territory for him and the organization.
“It's different in every way. It isn't something I'd ever anticipated,” he said.
