I once heard that the literal translation of Korea is "bright morning sun," which means that Korea is the nation of the early morning, symbolic of the Korean people's aspiration for brightness.

It was exciting to be able to go back to North Korea, a strange place to most people. I went there to help distribute chemical fertilizer donated by Tzu Chi. Since I returned to Taiwan in June, my thoughts have often shuttled freely between the two places. Traveling to Pyongyang via Hong Kong and Beijing is like traveling through a time tunnel from a modern country to a primitive one.

I once heard that the literal translation of Korea is "bright morning sun," which means that Korea is the nation of the early morning, symbolic of the Korean people's aspiration for brightness. True or not, this name gives one the general idea of the situation.

North Korea in December

North Korea in December is like a painting drawn with different shades of yellow--from the withered yellow trees on the roadsides to the dried yellow rice patches in the valley, then from the yellow mud dikes that line the rice patches to the magnificent yellow hills in the distant. With such a panoramic view, our cars drove alone along the seemingly endless highway.

I waved to a child at the roadside. Surprised by my friendly gesture, he shyly took off his gloves and waved back. Although the change of season caused the landscape to look vastly different from my last visit, the simplicity and politeness of the Korean people were comfortingly familiar.

A desolate winter scene came into view, the yellow landscape covered by a thin layer of frost. The freezing temperature had caused the growth of life to come to a pause, but you could still see children everywhere sledding on frozen rivers. It seemed that the lack of food did not stop the enjoyment of simple happiness.

Most farmers were taking this time to repair broken farming equipment, plow and level the fields, and produce home-made fertilizer, preparing and waiting for the sowing season after the snow melts in the coming spring.

Despite continuous natural disasters in recent years and severe shortages of food and fuel, the proud Koreans grit their teeth and say, "Although the road is tough, we will march forth with smiles on our faces."

Some say that if you don't compare yourself to anyone else, you don't feel hardship. North Korea, niched in a corner of the global village, is like a secluded village where people live peacefully, unperturbed by poverty.

Potato revolution

Chin Cheng-chi, deputy director of the North Korean International Trade Promotion Association, mentioned to Tzu Chi members that the long-time wish of North Koreans is to "eat rice, drink meat broth, and live in a brick house." Shortage of food has caused the meltdown of the national rationing system. We were told that for several years now after the harvest season, people have only been rationed enough rice to last a few months.

A local woman remarked that they have not had a grain of rice to eat since last fall. Lo Pao-chin, a member of the Tzu Chi relief team, said that when she was distributing rice, a middle-aged man grasped some grains that had fallen from the rice bag and put them straight into his mouth. Did he miss the taste of rice that much, or did he not want to waste a single grain?

An interpreter told us that in the past, after the harvest season, tractors were used to deliver a year's share of rice to every household. Everyone dressed up and danced to welcome the delivery and celebrate the bountiful harvest. But since the 1990s, this scene of abundance and prosperity has not been seen. Within the last five years, hundreds of thousands of people have died from starvation or malnutrition.

To alter national dietary habits that relied heavily on rice, authorities in North Korea launched a "Potato Revolution" last year. By increasing the farming acreage of potatoes and experimenting with different processing methods and recipes, authorities hope to correct the traditional perception of potatoes as a cheap food source.

Fighting hunger

Chin Cheng-chi arranged for us to visit the People's Hospital, the largest hospital in the city of Kaichuan. The cold building seemed deserted. We got to the third floor without meeting a single person. The director wanted to show us the operating room, but no doctor could be found because they too had left for the rice distribution. Here, the lack of material supplies was conspicuous.

The director said that five years ago a flood destroyed the hospital's equipment and vehicles, which have still not been restored. With the severe national shortage of food, the hospital cannot provide meals to inpatients. Due to the lack of vehicles, the hospital cannot transport coal or fuel for heating, therefore inpatients even have to bring their own quilts to keep warm. Under such miserable circumstances, patients are unwilling to seek treatment at any hospitals, even though medical care in North Korea is completely free of charge.

Currently many hospitals are short of nutritional dietary supplements. Many people have suffered from gastric problems after eating a "food substitute" that is concocted of cornstarch, grass roots and grains. National production of pharmaceuticals has come to an almost complete standstill due to scarcity of materials. Many hospitals have been forced to use traditional herbal medicine.

According to the latest statistics of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), eight hundred million people around the world go to bed with an empty stomach every night, a number greater than the population of Europe and North America added together! Of those, two hundred million are children who suffer from serious underdevelopment.

For many years FAO has been fighting hunger all over the world, with vastly different outcomes in different areas. In some countries the number of starving people has decreased dramatically; in other countries the number has increased significantly--North Korea for one.

Worldwide, 24,000 people die of hunger every day, and three-fourths of them are children under the age of five. In developing countries, ten percent of the children die of starvation before the age of five. Famine and war account for merely ten percent of these deaths; the major cause is chronic malnutrition.

North Korea now faces the problem of chronically malnourished children who suffer from impaired vision, fatigue, hampered development, lowered immunity and infectious diseases. Some of the children we saw lying in the People's Hospital in Kaichuan were victims of such sicknesses.

An unprecedented act

When we arrived at the Agricultural Administration Office in Kaichuan, our first stop for rice distribution, I was amazed to see that nearly nine thousand families had gathered there. Tens of thousands of people gathered together to receive relief supplies has not been a rare scene in Tzu Chi's past nine years of experience in international relief work. But it is indeed rare in North Korea, where it is not easy even for international relief workers to be allowed to enter, not to mention the gathering of villagers in large numbers.

Fifty Tzu Chi members were allowed to enter the rural regions of North Korea and personally deliver rice to local villagers. Chin Cheng-chi declared many times that this was unprecedented in North Korea. He remarked that it would be unusual if seven or eight members of a charity group were permitted to enter North Korea, let alone as many as fifty.

In fact, the severe shortage of food has forced North Korea to open up. A worker of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in North Korea said that two years ago, when he was first allowed to enter the country, he was treated more like a spy. At that time, the WFP had only a half-dozen people working there. Now, the WFP has forty-two foreign workers there, working together with forty-six locals. At present, there are approximately two hundred international relief workers in North Korea.

People of Asian courtesy

The Koreans have retained the traditions of respecting the old, caring for the young, treating each other politely, and living harmoniously together. Since ancient times, the Koreans have been lauded as "the people of Asian courtesy," a national character we witnessed during this visit.

Before they signed their names and collected the rice, Kaichuan villagers took off their gloves, handed in the notification for collecting rice with both hands [to show respect], and bowed to the Tzu Chi volunteers. They responded enthusiastically when Tzu Chi members led group activities, and lined up swiftly and quietly when called to assemble.

No one complained or showed impatience even when distribution was slow. If people received more packages of rice than they were supposed to, they returned the extra packages. Neighbors helped each other carry packages home. When a child was offered some candy, he took a piece out from his pocket to show that he already had some.

Because many men were working at the coal mine, mostly women, children and old people came to collect the rice. I was wondering how a young woman with a baby on her back was going to carry home sixty kilograms [132 lb] of rice, more than she weighed, when she smiled at me and pointed at her head, gesturing for me to put the bags on her head. I worried that she might sprain her neck, a consideration that proved to be unnecessary.

Some who came to collect the rice were children, because both their parents were not at home. A child gingerly balanced two packages of rice on his head and teetered on, but finally fell to the ground due to the overwhelming weight. From this scene, I saw not the mortification, but the resilience of the people of North Korea.

Looking at the weathered faces and cracked hands of the villagers, a member of the distribution team observed that all the members of the relief team had to apply lotion to their dried skin only a couple of days after their arrival. Apparently, the North Koreans are tough enough to endure even more hardship and difficulties.