A 50-year-old man who used to work for the North Korean government shares the story of his journey of defection - and being separated from his wife and children since 2006.

Q: Could you share a bit about your life in North Korea?

I used to work as a government officer in a local provincial center in Gang Won Do province. I served in the military for nine years, which is usually 10 years, but was allowed to leave early to study at the university. I went on to study industrial engineering for five years and then pursued work as a government official for my province.

Q: What made you discontent with your life there? How did you decide to leave?

In North Korea, everything is controlled by the centralized government and only those with high

positions live well. There is a sentiment that lives in the hearts of North Koreans and that is: "to live well by yourself and by overcoming hardships and poverty." Kim Il Sung is seen as the ideal model for this enduring spirit. Many stories of him are taught in grade schools of him having spent periods of his life in very trying conditions.

The North Korean people are strong and have become quite good at enduring hardships. Yet, it is only so long before people begin to ask: 'Just how long must we endure before things get better?' Some people are beginning to question whether or not they ever will.

Some co-workers and I used to discuss such things in private amongst one another. We asked ourselves, how we could bring about change. One of the individuals that I met with was a friend who did work in a division specializing in hacking and cyber warfare defense systems. He would later leave his job and flee to Seoul. Eventually, I would follow his lead.

The reason why I decided to leave was that I realized the model of 'living on our own and enduring' is not a practical model and that it will go on forever. It is better for us [North and South Koreans] to live together.

Q: How is it possible that so many people are able to live under a nation like North Korea? Is it that the citizens are so sheltered that they don't know what other kind of life they could be living, or is it perhaps that the people of your country actually believe that the system that they are working with is a force of righteousness?

The two go hand in hand. There are many people who do believe that they are working for the best cause on the face of the earth. But the reason that they come to believe such things is because they have not been exposed to anything else. The brainwashing in North Korea is powerful. But brainwashing is not a process of sitting people in front of TV's showing propaganda and hypnotizing them; rather, it is a process of confining their views so that the inevitable conclusions that they themselves draw on life are precisely what you would like them to be. They don't feed you beliefs, they feed you conditions—conditions which 99% of the time will lead you to come to believe what they want you to believe.

Q: Can you share how you managed to make it out of the country?

There are elaborate escape programs set up through Chinese brokers. This takes time -- in my case, two years. You can never really trust the broker that you are working with. In many cases individuals spend their life savings to make it across the border, only to find that they were set up. Just as some Chinese make a profit from sending individuals out of the country, there are others who make their living delivering refugees back to the North Korean government.

I mentioned before that I had a friend who had escaped. Actually, at the time he just disappeared, and after he left we never heard any details of what had happened with him. Two years passed and then one day out of the blue, I received a phone call from him. There are secret Chinese services that allow phone conversations between people in North Korea and family and friends who have made it to the outside.

He wanted to meet me at a town bordering the DMZ. I was excited to meet him again, but had no idea that during our meeting he would try to persuade me to join him in the South.

I followed his directions to the border where I paid a bribe to a soldier that he knew and entered a taxi that was waiting for me with several other individuals. I asked them many times where we were going, but nobody seemed to speak Korean. They were all speaking Chinese.

I saw my friend and he told me his plan. I told him that he was crazy. I had never thought about leaving North Korea. I told him it was dangerous, both for me and my family, but he assured me that he could provide protection both for me and my family. After our meeting, he had persuaded me. I went home, and shortly after my family and I fled to South Korea.

We made it to Seoul and established a life there, but in 2006 something happened with my family. They were caught and sent back to the North. Leaving North Korea is a sin in the government's eyes.

I later contacted my wife and told her that I had a way for her to come back, but she was afraid. It was revealed to me then that she and my children had suffered greatly under the hands of the government for having fled. My wife did not want for her and the children to have to ever experience anything like that again.

I have not seen my family since. There are brokers on this side that enable me to wire them

money untraced through Chinese bank accounts and to send them updates from time to time, however, it is uncertain as to whether or not I will ever see them again.

Q: Do you think reunification will ever occur?

People's minds need to change in order for this to happen. We need exchanges, and seeds of hope must be planted within individuals' hearts. This is difficult to do. In North Korea, one is not even allowed to say the word "reunification."

One thing that is often talked about in the dialogue is the idea of opening the gates and bringing the North up to the South's standards. Most people imagine that this will have to happen in the North's most desolate moment of hopelessness and poverty. But things will not happen this way. When there is poverty, North Korea only becomes more closed off and the authorities more controlling. And why would the South ever want to unify with a nation that has hit the lowest economic state possible? This would feel like a burden to the South, and from the North's perspective being lifted up from this low position of defeat would be humiliating.

Instead of unifying when the poles of disparity and wealth of North and South are at their greatest extremes, we have to strive towards arriving at a similar ground, not only economically, but also in terms of our hopes and dreams for a unified Korea.

Reunification must be dignified, and benefits must be seen from both sides. Yes, there is a great deal of work on infrastructure that will need to be done in North Korea, but we should not allow these figures to make us short-sighted. Now that tensions with neighbors in this region have simmered down, a united Korea run under a free-market economy would benefit greatly from having land borders with Russia and China. North Korea has many natural resources, and under the right system, our new Korea could utilize all of these factors to build a Korea that is stronger than the two could ever be on their own.

More important than economy, however, is our 5,000 years of shared history. Our differences are but a small speck in time when looked at from this perspective.

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