Two 12-year-old girls flanked by dozens of military personnel graduated on Wednesday from a South Korean elementary school inside the Demilitarized Zone that divides the South from North Korea.
The girls, Jeon Hee-ryung and Kim Na-young, attended Taesungdong Elementary School, which is patrolled by troops on the South Korean side of the DMZ.
North Korea keeps about 70 percent of its 1.2-million-strong armed forces near the border separating the two countries, which are technically still at war.
Kim said she will remember the school more for the snowball fights she had with her schoolmates than for the threat of being in the direct firing line of North Korea.
“I was not very scared at all when I went here,” she said of her school, which is about 500 yards from the border. “I never want to go to North Korea. I can see them farming with oxen plowing the fields. It looks very primitive.”
Taesungdong is a village with a population of 220 that was set up under the armistice that ended the 1950-1953 Korean War, along with a North Korean village on the other side of the DMZ. Some of the biggest flags in the world fly above them.
South Korea does its best to stock the school with goodies — although it has only 12 students — to better its bragging rights in a spot fraught with tension.
The elementary school, with about as many classrooms as students, has a staff of 14, large-screen televisions in most of the rooms and a well-stocked computer lab.
Kim Jin-soo, the father of one of the graduates, said he never worried about sending his daughter to school in the DMZ.
But he is worried about her transition to a girls’ school outside the area that has many more students, more competition and fewer resources to spend on each pupil.
“The kids grow up here, and the military presence in the DMZ is a way of life. They get used to it. I am much more worried about her going to middle school than going here,” he said.
The two girls, who both had perfect attendance records, were showered with gifts from local and national officials as well as from the military forces on the South Korean side of the DMZ.
The ceremony began with the other 10 students at the school entertaining the crowd of locals, political officials and military personnel with a traditional dance. Two armed South Korean soldiers stood on stage as the children twirled about.
“This school is in such a unique situation,” said Swiss Maj. Gen. Gerhard Brugger of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission in the DMZ, who also presented the graduates with gifts.
“This is a special moment not only for them but also for us because we can see a bit of normalcy in this unique situation.”
