[imText1]As long as you have enough energy just to hold your spoon, you have to participate in the activity.
Farm Supporting Combat is what North Korea calls the effort to force office workers, laborers, soldiers and even students to help farmers during the growing season.
Even though there are general collective farms in the North, there is a deficiency of farming equipment. Therefore, they need help especially during the farming season.
Farm support activity takes place all the time. You have to distinguish between “farm supporting activity” and “farm supporting combat.” Farm support activity occurs year round without a pause, but the “farm supporting combat” is just for spring and fall, during the growing season, and it is a major national activity.
The reason why they lock the toilet
During the winter season, people concentrate on producing manure which is the first step of the farm supporting activity. After the New Years’ holidays, January 1st and 2nd, and the Loyalty Vow on January 3nd, they start producing manure.
In Pyongyang, rural areas, or in other cities without exception, people have to start doing it at the same time. The amount of manure is allocated by the authority for each unit: factories, schools and peoples units. In the case of laborers, they should submit a certain amount of manure to their factories and their peoples’ units as well, because they belong to both.
The North Korean government evaluates the result of the activity depending on the amount of manure each unit gathers. The units which produce a comparatively small amount of manure are criticized in regular evaluation meetings and get some disadvantages. Therefore, even dog droppings on the streets are precious, not to mention feces in their toilets.
Feces in toilettes are worth so much to people in rural and suburban areas, they don’t throw away their feces but usually store it for safe keeping. There are even feces thieves during this season for producing manure. People lock their toilettes in order to use feces mixed with soil as fertilizer.
Feces stored in their toilettes are not enough to submit to the Party, so sometimes people collect peat.
In rural areas, each household has to submit 1 ton of manure a year. From early January to Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16th, people intensively put all their effort into producing enough manure.
Pyongyang citizens collecting feces
The “combat” for producing manure goes on in major cities as well including Pyongyang. Right after the royalty vow on January 1st, “manure producing“ and “thermal power plant supporting” starts at the same time. Citizens have to go to Pyongyang Thermal Power Plant and help laborers carry coal. However thermal power plant supporting is much easier than manure producing, because it is just a kind of simple labor.
For Pyongyang citizens, producing manure is a great burden, especially those who live in apartment complexes. Such people as live in Joong-distirct, where the high apartment complexes stand closely, need support from their acquaintance or relatives who live in one-storied houses, like Dongdaewon-distirct. People living in Dongdaewon-distirct are sharing feces in their toilets with others because they don’t have any space for a private patch.
In spite of support of other relatives, if house wives can not submit the fixed, allocated amount of manure as members of the Women’s Union, they have to make up the difference by helping to deliver the collected manure to the rural farming areas.
They don’t use trucks or trains but just handcarts. They carry full carts all day long while others bring flags and beat drums along side the carters to encourage them until they reach the rural areas in what is a tough journey. (continues)
