As North Korea nears the “barley hump” — the lean time in the spring before the barley harvest — residents of Hwapyong County, Chagang Province, are facing severe privation, Daily NK has learned. Even children feel compelled to forage for food in the woods instead of going to school.
“The barley hump is the time of year when the food supply runs the lowest, but people are having an even harder time this year than in the past. Large numbers of families are going hungry, unable to afford even one meal a day,” a reporting partner in Chagang Province told Daily NK last Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.
“In Hwapyong County, a lot of children have been going off to gather wild vegetables and supplement the family’s food supply instead of going to school. Most of the children go foraging in groups, and their clothing is so shabby that they look like packs of street urchins, even though they have homes and families,” the reporting partner said.
The children go around barefoot or in shoes that are too big for their feet, tattered old clothing on their backs and black smudges on their faces, so it is no wonder that they are often mistaken for urchins, the reporting partner explained.
“Working parents barely have time to rinse off their children’s stained clothing, and they can’t afford to buy new shoes when the old shoes start to wear out. Since nearly all the families in each neighborhood watch unitNeighborhood watch units (inminban, people's units) are Nort... More [inminban] are in the same predicament, the children troop around together without mistreating each other,” the reporting partner said.
Children head to the woods in groups to forage for food
Aware that their parents’ earnings aren’t enough to support the family, these children head to the woods together to forage for wild vegetables almost every day instead of going to school. These families are subsisting on vegetable porridge, which they prepare by adding the vegetables foraged by the children with their meager grain supplies.
The reporting partner related the following sad story shared by a resident of Hwapyong County.
“My daughter headed to school, or so she said, in shoes that show her toes. She didn’t say a word about her worn-out shoes, although she typically throws a fit about them, which was even more distressing for me. But when I got home from the marketplace that evening, my daughter had brought back wild vegetables from the woods, which meant she hadn’t gone to school at all. When I told her she needed to go to school tomorrow, she pointed out that we might starve to death if she doesn’t gather wild vegetables. I choked up and couldn’t say a word.”
That tallied with the following tale, related by another resident of Hwapyong County.
“Since the pandemic began, we haven’t been able to buy our son new shoes, which go for well over KPW 100,000, so we bought used shoes instead. But our son’s feet are growing quickly, and his used shoes wear out so fast. Nowadays, he goes out in his father’s big shoes or sometimes in his socks. Not being able to afford decent shoes is bad enough, but we have the added pain of watching him go foraging in the woods to help put food on the table. I just wish there was something else we could do.”
Daily attendance at schools in Hwapyong County has fallen to between five and ten students per class, the reporting partner said. Homeroom teachers have been dropping by students’ houses in an attempt to boost the attendance rate, but conditions are so bad for everyone that the teachers sometimes cannot bring themselves to order the students back to class, the reporting partner said.
“You can imagine how bad things have gotten when students are skipping school to go forage in the woods without even being told to. People are saying that if the government can’t feed the hungry itself, it should open up [the border] so that people can smuggle in enough to support themselves,” he added.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
Daily NK works with a network of reporting partners who live inside North Korea and China. Their identities remain anonymous due to security concerns. More information about Daily NK’s reporting partner network and information gathering activities can be found on our FAQ page here.
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