Afghanistan (Intl. Herald Tribune) South Korea: Seo Jeong Bae was not too worried when his daughter and son, both Christians, told him last month that they were going to Afghanistan on an aid mission to help children in the Islamic country.

His daughter had already traveled to Uzbekistan, India and Uganda for volunteer work. “Father, don’t worry. We don’t proselytize. How can I?” she assured her father, who is not a Christian. “I can’t even speak the language.”

Above all, Seo supported his children’s trip because he knew what it was like a child growing up in a war-ravaged country; he was born in February 1950, four months before the outbreak of the Korean War.

“Whenever I saw those poor children on television, I thought of my own childhood,” Seo said. “I felt good and proud when my children left for Afghanistan.”

The family’s humanitarian dream has since turned into a nightmare. Taliban insurgents kidnapped Seo’s 29-year-old daughter, Myeong Hwa, his 27-year-old son, Kyeong Seok, and 21 other South Korean church volunteers on July 19, six days after they left for Afghanistan on a 10-day mission.

The Taliban have killed two of the seven male hostages. They have threatened to kill more unless the U.S. and Afghan governments swap them for insurgent prisoners. President George W. Bush and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan reconfirmed their position Monday after a summit, which was watched anxiously by the Korean relatives of the hostages, that “there should be no quid pro quo” that could embolden the Taliban.

“Eating feels like a sin, sleeping feels like a sin, when I think about my children. I have never felt so helpless as a father.”

Each deadline issued by the Taliban for the lives of the hostages “burned my heart out,” said Seo, who was red-eyed and appeared exhausted during an interview late Monday.

The South Korean government has been under intense pressure to free the hostages, although some antichurch bloggers on the Internet have angrily criticized the Christian volunteers for going to Afghanistan despite warnings from the government in Seoul.

“They just don’t understand my children,” Seo said after a pause and sigh, when asked about the bloggers.

Like most South Koreans who had barely heard of the Taliban until the war in Afghanistan began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Seo finds what happened to his children to be both an outrage and a puzzle.

“Kidnapping people for their religion – this is something I just cannot understand. Here, no one harms you because of your religion,” he said. “My children did not go to Afghanistan with guns or knives. They did not go there to make money. They went there to help children.”

Seo said Myeong Hwa was “the kind of child who asked so many questions about the world around her.” She started going to church as a small child. She worked as an announcer on her high school broadcasting club. She liked to look after a disabled cousin. Once she asked Seo for money to help pay the tuition of a poor friend.

After becoming a nurse five years ago, she saved and used her vacations to join church-sponsored aid missions abroad. For months after returning from those trips, she would tell her parents about the “big dark eyes and little hands” of the children she met, Seo said.

Myeong Hwa was married in December. She recently quit a job at a university hospital so that she could focus on preparations to emigrate to the United States, where she hoped to continue to work as a nurse. But before going to the United States, she wanted to introduce her brother to the different world at far corners of the globe she encountered as a volunteer worker.

Trained as a hairdresser, Kyeong Seok readily accepted his sister’s suggestion that he travel with her to Afghanistan; at least he could give children haircuts, he told his parents. He worked night shifts at 24-hour-a-day convenience stores to pay for the air tickets. His mother, who worked at a food factory, chipped in.

“I hope the world can transcend politics, ideology and religion, and just save human lives,” he added. “I cannot accept the possibility that I might never be able to hold my children again.”