This week, millions of people shared a video from 2014 of Yeonmi Charlesworth speaking at the One Young World Summit in Dublin. In the speech, Yeonmi shares her story about life as a North Korean refugee. She describes the horrors of what growing up in North Korea was like, including a story about watching one of her friend's mothers getting publicly executed for watching a Hollywood movie. Life in North Korea was so bad that Yeonmi and her family risked it all to try to escape in 2007. During her family's escape, at the age of 13, Yeonmi had to watch her mother be raped by a Chinese broker, and at the age of 14, she had to silently bury her father in secret after he died in China.

"Roughly 300,000 North Korean refugees are vulnerable in China, and 70% of North Korean women and teenage girls are being victimized, sometimes being sold for as little as $200," Yeonmi said. And she's not wrong, human trafficking along the North Korean/Chinese border is a huge issue, and aside from that, the Chinese government also sends captured refugees back to North Korea where they are to be sentenced to execution. Refugees often have to travel to Mongolia or South Korea to find freedom. In Yeonmi's case, she had to cross the Gobi desert by compass.

Along with sharing her story, she also gave us three tips on how to help North Koreans:

1. Educate yourself so you can raise awareness about the human crisis in North Korea.

2. Help and support North Korean refugees who are trying to escape to freedom.

3. Petition China to stop repatriation.

For those of you who are not familiar with the term repatriation, it means to send someone back to their own country. But I think we can all agree, these refugees don't have their "own" country in North Korea. They have been living in a country that is completely owned and ruled by the Kim dictatorship. They have been living in a country that could care less about its people's well-being. We must join together to help North Korean refugees! This is a life or death matter for them. Nobody deserves to be oppressed and abused like this.

To learn more about Yeonmi and her cause, you can read her autobiography, "In Order to Live" here.

You can watch the speech that inspired this article here.