#but the IL system is just truly hellish

[shitty-check-please-aus]

one of the few things Indiana government has done well was to listen to feedback about how terrible the Bureau of Motor Vehicles was to deal with, completely overhaul the entire system, and ultimately create a very fast, easy, and efficient BMV

one of the many things Illinois government has done poorly is to not do any of those things

[thearnoldtully]

Starvation! From: A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea

So we’d grab our shovels and find a strip of land by the roadside or up against an apartment building. We’d hoe the soil and plant beans or Chinese cabbages. But it was a waste of effort. It was almost impossible to find seeds, and even if you did manage to find some and get something to grow, it would be stolen before the harvest.

By Ishikawa, Masaji. A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea Amazon Crossing (January 1, 2018) (Must read. Mike)

Excerpt:

Ever since setting foot in North Korea more than thirty years before, I’d known nothing but hunger. Everyone had been halfway to starvation for decades. But things had taken a turn for the worse starting in 1991. From 1991 until Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, extremely cold weather wreaked havoc on the fragile food supply.

Under the food-distribution system, regular workers were officially entitled to one and a half pounds of grain per day. For some perverse reason, farmers were entitled to less than that. The actual amount, even for regular workers, was one pound, 70 percent of which was just cornstarch. Needless to say, party members received a much larger ration.

Rations were supposed to be distributed twice a month, but beginning in 1991, there were regular delays. In the end, we had to survive for half a month on three days’ worth of food. Inevitably, things turned nasty. People descended on the food-distribution stations, and violence broke out in explosive bursts.

The party started churning out more slogans, more propaganda. I couldn’t help but wonder where they even got all the paper for the posters—and whether I could eat it. And what did all these wretched posters tell us? They gave advice on alternatives to the standard food ration.

“Make the root of rice plants into a powder and eat it! It’s rich in protein! . . . Arrowroot contains a lot of starch! . . . If you eat and survive, we can definitely prevail!” Useless information, all delivered with the usual histrionic exclamation marks. By that time, we’d been scouring the ground for ages for anything edible—acorns, mugwort, pine-tree bark. It was hellish stuff. You can use bark to make something vaguely resembling a rice cake. It was a dreadful thing. People had eaten it out of desperation at the end of the colonial era and again just after the Korean War. Times when people had no other choice. Times like the ones we found ourselves in.

Here’s how to make it. First, boil the pine bark for as long as possible to get rid of all the toxins. (Many people botched this stage and died in agony as a result.) Next, add some cornstarch and steam the evil brew. Then cool it, form it into cakes, and eat it. This was easier said than done. The pine oil stinks to high heaven and makes it almost impossible to consume it. But if you wanted to live, you choked it down.

That’s when the real fun began. Crippling gut pain that brought us to our knees; constipation that you wouldn’t believe. When the pain became unbearable—there’s no delicate way of putting this—you had to shove your finger up your anus and scoop out your concrete shit. I’m sorry. You didn’t need to know that. Except you did. It’s the only thing that shows how desperate we were.

After the death of Kim Il-sung, everything ground to a halt. Farming. Industry. Everything. No raw materials of any kind got delivered to the factory. We had only a few hours of electricity, if we were lucky. Production gradually sputtered out. Workers collapsed on the floor before my eyes, weak with hunger.

Sometimes we received an official notice from the party, giving us permission to cultivate any vacant land we could find. So we’d grab our shovels and find a strip of land by the roadside or up against an apartment building. We’d hoe the soil and plant beans or Chinese cabbages. Others created plots on mountainsides and attempted to plant sweet corn and potatoes. But it was a waste of effort. It was almost impossible to find seeds, and even if you did manage to find some and get something to grow, it would be stolen before the harvest. The crops were pulled when they were no bigger than your thumb.

Children gave up going to school. I’d see them wandering the streets with the adults, desperately searching for food. Myong-hwa and Ho-son got thinner and thinner, their faces so sunken that their eyes looked huge, entirely out of proportion to their other features. I wanted to cry whenever I looked at their small bony bodies, but I lacked even the energy for that.

The situation grew more and more dire. Starving people wandered around hopelessly, while others simply lay in the street. Soon there were corpses too, lying out in the open, unclaimed and left to rot. Women. Old people. Kids.

The black market operated openly. Stalls sprang up right in front of the police station, and the authorities couldn’t do anything about it. Not the cops, not even the dreaded secret police. If they’d tried to intervene, all hell would have broken loose.

Not that the black market was any use to people who didn’t have hard currency. If you tried to buy something with local currency, the price went up a hundredfold unless you had a watch or some useful household items to barter.

Someone like me—with no hard currency and no goods to exchange—could only buy rice gruel from a shop that a cockroach would have fled from. That, or wander about the market in hopes of picking up some crumbs another unlucky bastard had inadvertently dropped.

The only other option was to steal. That was the quickest and easiest solution, and it grew increasingly common.

Another huge change that occurred around this time was that it suddenly became much easier to move around. In the past, you couldn’t get on a train without official travel documents. But now you were free to go anywhere if you had a ticket, which usually simply involved bribing someone.

Not that I could take advantage of these changing circumstances, as I had no money. Production at the factory I worked in had gradually ceased, so I had no goods to trade.

My family and I started to pick a plant called omode. We searched and picked till it got dark, by which time our hands were bleeding. Once we had a decent bag of it, we returned home and peeled off the skin. Mashed the flesh. Boiled the stuff. It tasted foul, but we’d eat anything to survive.

I sometimes felt ashamed of myself. I worried about Ho-chol; I had no idea where he was, but I thought about him all the time. I apologized to the kids and to my wife for our miserable life. My children were always kind, always hopeful. They knew I liked a smoke whenever I could get my hands on one, so they used to pick up cigarette butts and give them to me. We were on the verge of starvation, but the bonds of family love remained intact. Which was more than you could say for some people. I heard many stories of families falling out over food. I even heard a rumor of one man killing his wife and eating her. I’m sure it was true, and I’m equally sure he wasn’t the only one.

By the summer of 1995, we were truly terrified that we might die of hunger. Then in August, disaster struck. A devastating flood hit South Pyongan Province, an important grain-producing area. That meant the end of our grain ration. When autumn came, we started to collect acorns in desperation. With no grain, acorns were the only things that might see us through the coming winter. So we collected as many as we possibly could. We boiled them and ate them once a day, and to us, God help us, they tasted delicious. And yes, they did see us through.

By the spring of 1996, the land we’d cultivated next to our apartment building was useless. There were no young seedlings to plant, no seeds, and no fertilizer either. The factory had shut down. By this time, so many people had died that I saw hordes of orphans wandering around.

It got so bad that we eventually started eating any old weeds we could find. We boiled the wretched things for ages to try to get rid of their harshness. But it was hopeless. They still tasted rank. And they did the most appalling things to us. Our bodies grew swollen, our faces grew swollen, and our urine turned red or even blue. We all suffered from chronic diarrhea. We couldn’t even walk in that condition.

No one thought or talked about anything except food. When we could manage to get around, we spent all our time searching and searching for anything remotely edible. We were nothing but a bunch of ravenous ghosts. The barely living dead.

I don’t know how many people starved to death. You heard stories all the time.

“That woman whose husband died? Well, she’s dead too. Died alone.”

“I haven’t seen old so-and-so recently. Have you? I guess he didn’t make it.”

“I found this woman lying on the street. I checked, but she was cold already.”

I heard stories of cannibalism. Rumor had it that if those participating in such acts got caught, they were executed in public. I never witnessed a public execution myself, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Every day was like living in a nightmare. It sounds dreadful to say, but I grew immune to the horror of all the people lying in the streets. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell whether they were dying or already dead. And the awful thing was, I didn’t have the energy to care.

People started asking awkward questions in public. Like, when would they be able to eat white rice and meat soup? No one would have asked a question like that in the past, not even in private.

Link to book.

from Gardening http://cityfarmer.info/starvation-from-a-river-in-darkness-one-mans-escape-from-north-korea/ via http://www.rssmix.com/