Faye Moon

Life

Moon Hye-rim was born Harriett Faye Pinchbeck and was also known as Faye Moon. She was born in 1936 in Connecticut into a family of English immigrants who ran a rose farm. Although she grew up in comfortable circumstances, she learned about the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s through her church teachers. During school vacations she did volunteer work in Harlem, New York, and it was reportedly then that she resolved to devote her life to helping the marginalized.

Around 1960 she studied social work at Hartford Seminary, where she met the Rev. Moon Dong-hwan, who was then studying in the United States. Moon Dong-hwan was fifteen years her senior and the younger brother of the Rev. Moon Ik-hwan. The two were married in December 1961 at Kyungdong Presbyterian Church in Seoul, after which she lived and worked in South Korea. In 1992 she and her husband returned to the United States, settling in New Jersey. She died at her home in New Jersey on March 11, 2022 (local time), at the age of 86.

Ministry and Achievements

Support for the Democratization Movement

During the period of military dictatorship, Moon organized the "Monday Group" with foreign missionaries who supported democratization in South Korea. The group worked to inform the outside world about the human rights situation in Korea and the struggle against dictatorship. At the time, she was working as a social worker on a U.S. military base, counseling American servicemen struggling with alcohol and drug addiction. This position reportedly enabled her to send news and materials out of Korea through the U.S. military mail, which was not subject to censorship. In 1987 she took part in a memorial rally for Park Jong-chul together with her husband and Park Yong-gil, the wife of the Rev. Moon Ik-hwan. These activities belong to the broader history of the church and the democratization movement.

Founding of Durebang

Through her counseling of American servicemen, Moon became aware of the plight of camp town women, that is, women who worked with U.S. soldiers as their clientele in the areas surrounding American military bases. In March 1986, in a joint project of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the National Women's Association of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea, she opened the mission center Durebang next to Camp Red Cloud in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi Province. The name derives from dure, a traditional Korean term for a community whose members work together and help one another. The center was intended as a place where camp town women could gather, rest, talk, and support one another. Durebang later relocated to Gosan-dong in Uijeongbu, an area commonly known as "Ppaeppeol Village."

Influence on the Korean Church

Durebang is a ministry of service (diakonia) carried out by the church in the neglected corners of society. It is cited as an example of the church addressing, on the ground, the issue of camp town women, who had long fallen into a blind spot of human rights concern. Durebang has continued to expand its work. In 2009 it established the Durebang Shelter to assist migrant women who had come into the camp towns and been victimized in the sex trade, and in 2021 it founded Pum, the Pyeongtaek Women's Human Rights Counseling Center. Moon reflected on her encounters with camp town women from the perspective of faith; in the preface to the book The Women of Durebang, she reportedly discussed the relationship between Durebang and theology.

Assessment

The press described Moon as a woman who, as both wife and comrade of her husband Moon Dong-hwan, devoted her life to the democratization movement and to the human rights of camp town women. Particular attention was drawn to the fact that a foreign woman stood alongside camp town women whom Korean society had ignored. No significant criticism of her is widely known.