“…In the city of Chongjin, for example, electricity became intermittent. This not only effected people’s ability to cook and stay warm, but it also stunted agricultural and manufacturing operations. Running water was rare, too. Fabrics arrived late to the factories, and soon the fabrics didn’t arrive at all. Workers began scouring for scrap metal, and took to menial tasks like sweeping the empty factory floors in hopes of remaining employed. The paychecks eventually stopped though. Many continued their duty to work though it was now without pay, while others no longer bothered to show up. This was a brave new world for North Korean people, because employment had been the only way to get state-issued tickets for food, but by this time in the mid-1990s, the government rationing had basically stopped for most of the population. It wasn’t just internal agony varying from person to person. Soon, the larger infrastructure began to collapse. Public trams rarely arrived and often broke down. Ambulances eventually ran out of gas. The hospitals, lacking electricity for procedures and medicine for recovery, became a pointless destination for the ill and malnourished. People were dying now, and the children were the most susceptible. What was a minor cold or cough could lead a child to death within days. Mothers were too deficient to produce breast milk for the babies and rice was too expensive a substitute for most. The Worker’s Party members, located mostly in Pyongyang, fared a little bit better during this national catastrophe, but even that status was no longer a guarantee of relative comfort.
“It was life in agonizing slow motion for the average North Korean; an endless search to consume anything the earth provided that wouldn’t poison the body. ‘Mrs. Song didn’t feel hungry so much as depleted… After she finished eating, the spoon would drop from her hand with a clang into the metal dish. She would collapse into a heap on the floor without bothering to change clothes, falling into a deep sleep until somehow her instinct for survival told her that, although it was still dark, she had to resume the search for food…she had the sensation that she was already dead, floating above the empty receptacle of what once had been her body.’ Throughout the city streets, it was becoming more and more common to have to step over dead bodies.”
From The Broken Telegraph, “Inside North Korea Pt. II: The Creep of Famine”
