After TIME'S Foreign News section told the story last spring of Korean Nurse Grace Kim and her adopted son Ronnie (see picture below), many of you responded by writing letters and sending gifts to the Kim family. Because of such evident personal interest, I would like to pass along a recent progress report I received on Ronnie and his mother.

As you may recall, the TIME account (April 5) was one of those stories of people caught in the backlash of war.

Ronnie was a waif, deserted by his father, a U.S. Army officer who left Korea. Then his mother, after struggling to feed and clothe him, died of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

For a time, indifferent relatives cared for the boy. When the Communists entered Seoul in June 1950, Ronnie was hidden in a heatless shack.

Later that fall, officials of the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital found him amid the bomb rubble, frail and ill but still alive.

At the hospital he was given food and vitamins in an attempt to nurse him back to health. There, one of the nurses, Grace Kim, who had already adopted a war-orphaned Korean girl, decided to adopt Ronnie. But despite his care, Ronnie developed alarming symptoms. An orthopedic surgeon made the diagnosis: Ronnie had tuberculosis of the spine. A delicate bone graft was necessary. Nurse Kim made her decision: the doctors could take bone grafts from her own leg to reinforce Ronnie's diseased vertebrae.

TIME'S April story concluded: "Last week the doctor chipped off a plaster cast that had held Grace Kim prisoner for nearly five months. Grace, he said, would limp for a long time to come, but eventually she would walk normally. As for her foster son, his back is still in a cast, but growing stronger every day ..."

The recent news I received of Ronnie came from Nurse Kim's husband, Duk Shin Kim, a student at Emmanuel Missionary College in Berrien Springs, Mich.

Wrote Mr. Kim: "I am glad to inform you that both Ronnie and his mother are doing fine. After being in a cast from the neck down to the knees for months and crawling like a turtle, Ronnie was finally let out of the cast. Now he is able to walk. Every day he walks to his mother's office, where she supervises the nurses' training school. He is able to kick a soccer ball almost as well as any normal boy. His ambition is to become a doctor. My wife still walks with a slight limp. As she and Ronnie go about the grounds of the hospital, people stand and watch in admiration.

"We want to thank your readers, those good people who prayed for us, sent clothing and gifts and wrote letters of cheer and encouragement for Ronnie's recovery."

Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.