Lee Taek-gu is about to meet his little sister — something he's waited 65 years for.
The 89-year-old South Korean was joining about 186 families this week at North Korea's Geumgang mountain resort, where he'll be reunited with his sibling for the first time since the 1950-1953 Korean War split the peninsula and hundreds of thousands of families. He's one of the lucky ones.
More than 80 percent of survivors are over the age of 70. About half the 130,000 South Koreans who have applied since 1988 to meet loved ones in North Korea in 19 organized reunions have died. Only about 1,900 Koreans have been physically reunited since the conflict ended in a truce — the frequency of the meetings rising and falling since the year 2000 as diplomatic tensions wax and wane. This week's reunions, which kicked off Tuesday, are the first since February last year and follow an August agreement between the two Koreas to cool a military standoff.