PORT ORCHARD, Wash. — Kenneth Bae was volunteering with the organization "Youth With A Mission" when he was arrested in North Korea.
"We’re actually bigger than the Peace Corps,” Ron Boehme, YWAM’s director for the Pacific Northwest told KIRO 7 from his home office in Port Orchard.
Youth With A Mission has more than 25,000 volunteers worldwide, and thousands of them are in countries that don’t want them there.
“Are people afraid of freedom?” Boehme asked. To answer his own question, he said some governments are.
Still - the non-profit has been in every single nation in the world to provide aid but also to share what they call the “good news” of Jesus Christ, and Kenneth Bae was not the first volunteer to be detained while doing it.
“We’ve had a number of people who have been imprisoned. I myself was almost imprisoned at one time. I didn’t actually end up in jail but was arrested in the Soviet Union before the fall of the Iron Curtain,” Boehme explained.
He told us that Youth With A Mission still has 50 to 100 people in North Korea at any given time.
There’s a map inside his office with dots that indicate where in the world volunteers are working.
“Notice these dots are just in a little straight line,” he explained, pointing to places in China, Africa, and North Korea. “We can’t put these exactly where we are in a number of countries because it’s not allowed.”
Boehme said his missionaries are still traveling into those countries though; they just may be based elsewhere.
Bae, for example, was stationed in China for more than half a decade and was taking what YWAM calls “tours” into North Korea.
“They’re Christian outreaches in the sense of going to pray in a nation, often times bringing goods or supplies to people,” said Boehme.
Boehme said every day other missionaries with the organization will continue to do what got Bae arrested - sharing Christianity.
KIRO
