Hello there, fellow Ask a North Korean-ers! Welcome back to the feature where you the readers can email in with your questions about the DPRK and have them answered by our very own defector writers.

Today’s question is about orphans in North Korea. Is there a difference between how orphans are treated in the capital and how they live in the northern provinces bordering China? What care does the government provide for them?

In-hua Kim, from Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, answers these questions while detailing her own first-hand experiences concerning the issue.

Got a question for In-hua? Email it to [email protected] with your name and city. We’ll be publishing the best ones.

In North Korea, street orphans are called kotjebi — literally, “flower swallows.” There are a great many of these orphans living in the markets and train stations nowadays, wandering about in cold and hunger.

In North Korea, orphans live pitiful lives on the brink of death.

When people see these poor orphans begging for food in the streets, markets, and stations, they feel anger — not so much for the parents who have discarded their children, but towards the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un.

The Kim Jong Il/Kim Jong Un dictatorship turned North Korea into the most backward country on earth. They were sending satellites into space as the people suffered from starvation and political oppression.

It was then that the number of these orphans, who were unknown during the Kim Il Sung period, exploded. Death from malnutrition became a daily reality for the people of North Korea and the more and more started to defect.

While I was incarcerated in No. 1 Re-education Camp in Kaechon City, South Pyongan Province for illegal possession of a cell phone, prisoners had to gather each weekend for political study and to view documentary films.

There were around 780 female prisoners in Kaechon Re-Education Camp, including those serving life sentences. Most were housewives who had themselves raised children.

The documentary shown to the assembled prisoners was one about Kim Jong Un looking around the newly constructed Pyongyang Orphanage and Pyongyang Nursing Home, together with military inspections.

Their aim in showing this documentary film to the female prisoners was to brainwash us: “You’ve been caught committing crimes, yet Marshal Kim Jong Un has built an orphanage where he is taking care of the children you abandoned. So you must make amends for your crimes and go out and serve Marshal Kim Jong Un well.”

Their attempts to brainwash us with this documentary didn’t work. Through visits from the outside and newly arrived prisoners, the women in the re-education camp struggled to fight back bitter tears when they heard that the children they had left behind after being caught were now begging for food in the markets and train stations.

Not even a month after I was released in October 2016, I visited my older sister in Pyongsong, where I ended up viewing the opening ceremony for the newly built orphanage and nursing home in Kuwol-dong.

The words that were being muttered by those attending the opening ceremony left a deep impression on me.

“What’s the point in building orphanages and nursing homes. Nursing homes are just places where those rich bastards who hate taking care of their parents funnel bribes to get their old folk sent away.

“And the orphanages just pose as places where orphans are looked after — in reality, the cadres are hauling away the supplies that the state sends down while the orphans spend their days hanging about in the markets. So what’s the point in spending money on such buildings.”

Either way, it is true that in its early days the Kim Jong Un regime paid great attention to nursing homes and orphanages.

The biggest human rights problem in North Korea concerns the country’s political prisoners. They live locked up in concentration and re-education camps, while outside children beg for food on the streets and old folk who are unable to do business wither away from hunger.

It seems that soon after Kim Jong Un took power he thought that if he paid attention to and took care of such social problems, the people would praise and follow him.

For such reasons, the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital was renovated, expanded, and fitted with new equipment imported from abroad.

Kim Jong Un’s “love for the people,” however, was not love for all the people of North Korea — just love for the residents of Pyongyang.

The Pyongyang Maternity Hospital is easily accessible to Pyongyangites, but unreachable for women from the provinces.

To go to the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital from the provinces you must first obtain a “diagnosis transfer certificate” from your own province’s maternity hospital. This must then be stamped by the head of your inminban, your workplace, the police and secret police officers responsible for your area of residence, and the neighborhood management office.

Then you can push and shove to bring the certificate to department 2 of your provincial people’s committee. Only then can you receive a travel permit to go to the Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

Even if one does manage to obtain the requisite documents, you might end up having to go to and from the train station for several days after your train is delayed trying to find out when the next one is coming, only being able to buy a ticket two hours before the train is set to leave.

Whoever thought buying a train ticket could be so difficult…

If you have a lot of money, you can pay a little more to purchase your ticket with relative ease. People with no money have to stand in long lines for theirs.

But even if you stubbornly queue up to buy your tickets, quite often you still won’t be able to get them that day. This is because station employees are constantly siphoning off tickets in exchange for bribes.

Given how difficult the process is and how much effort it requires, patients from the provinces give up on the idea of receiving treatment at Pyongyang Maternity Hospital.

Soojin, the pregnant woman next door to me who lived with her mother, didn’t have any money. She couldn’t afford to go to the hospital and died taking opium to alleviate the pain she was suffering from.

The mother and her baby daughter were diagnosed as suffering from the same uterine cancer, but how could they have afforded to go to the hospital when they couldn’t even buy rice to eat?

There are a great many of these orphans living in the markets and train stations nowadays, wandering about in cold and hunger

Despite proclamations that they have the most excellent free socialist healthcare system in the world, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea lacks even adequate medicine. It’s a country where if you feel pain you take opium, and the next day wither up and die.

In Hyesan there are so many opium addicts that if leader of the country Kim Jong Un were to see opium addiction statistics he would be deeply shocked.

Kotjebi orphans taking opium to momentarily forget their sorrow is not a thing of the past, but the reality of my hometown even today.

It is said that the orphans get their opium from the crops that farmers plant on the mountainside far from the prying eyes of the police.

Occasionally you meet people in North Korean society who laugh at the orphans and treat them brusquely or with indifference.

It was mid-May 2015 that I was locked up in the jail of Hyesan City Police Station for possession of an illegal cell phone.

I was occupying cell no. 7, and the adjacent cell was no. 5. I saw the jailer cursing at someone from the front of that cell.

The rest of the prisoners sat in silence with their heads bowed. Hearing the jailer’s snarling curses, they couldn’t believe their ears.

Some of the female prisoners became angry as they sat listening to the jailer scream profanities.

“What a bastard,” “What kind of f****r would sexually assault a poor orphan?” “Bastards like that should be executed by firing squad,” the women in my cell, heads lowered, whispered to those sitting next to them.

Later, as I was carried away to hospital after suffering heart shock, I heard the stories that the hospital wardens told each other. As the mother of a daughter, I was overcome with anger and felt nothing but disgust for this man who called himself a teacher.

This 58-year-old sports teacher at Hyesan Middle School had been accused of raping five fourth-year students. These girls were orphans and actually lived at the school.

In all North Korean provinces, teachers and students carry out guard duty together on the school premises. During this guard duty, the teacher would sleep overnight in the security office with the five students, and according to accounts repeatedly molested them.

The victims were unable to speak of this to each other, instead just studying each other’s faces as they shook with unease.

There are many orphans at Hyesan Middle School. Amid hard times in the country’s history, food and material relief for orphans was not only scarce, but it was being embezzled by employees managing the school. As a result, the orphans continually languished in hunger.

Luckily, Ryanggang Province lies across the river from China, from which clothes and shoes for children were sourced and given to Hyesan Middle School as a priority.

The children who had suffered from sexual abuse were afraid that if they spoke out about what had happened, they wouldn’t get clothes, shoes, or food, instead receiving punishment. So they didn’t say anything.

Each time they passed by the front of Hyesan Middle School, people glanced over at the children playing in the school’s fenced exercise grounds and felt pity. “Look over there,” they tutted, “they look so emaciated from the cold and hunger.”

The school’s orphans, scrawny from malnutrition, were so stunted in their growth that fifteen-year-old children were even shorter than the ten-year-olds from the local people’s school.

The wretched sight of these orphans was like a strong wind that whispered in my ear, telling me not to stay in North Korea any longer

It was while the orphans who were sexually abused by the sports teacher were fearing punishment for speaking out that the homeroom teacher of one of the girls saw her diary.

The homeroom teacher observed that this girl, who was bubbly and clever, had since the day she performed guard duty stopped eating the meager amount of food they were given at the school, and stopped speaking.

Whenever she had spare time, the girl, whose name was Chun Hee, would be jotting something down in her diary, so the teacher called her over.

“Chun Hee, is something up? Why haven’t you had any energy or play with your friends since the day you did guard duty? What’s this notebook you’re writing in?”

The child at first lowered her head and offered no response to the homeroom teacher’s questions, before at last breaking into painful sobs before answering the patiently waiting teacher.

She said that the sports teacher had that night removed each of the children’s clothing one-by-one and performed strange motions on them.

Chun Hee, who was lying down at the very end, was scared by teacher as he molested each child in turn. She lay down with her eyes shut as he approached her and grasped her hand. She tried to scream as he stroked her.

Chun Hee said that the sports teacher had covered her mouth with his hand and commanded her not to make a sound as he continued to do what he was doing.

The children were so afraid of the physical education teacher that they didn’t resist.

The homeroom teacher was in total shock at what Chun Hee had told her, and flipped through her diary before taking her to see the principal.

As soon as Chun Hee recounted what the children went through, the rage-filled principal called over all the children and questioned them.

After confirming the facts, the principal brought the children to the Hyesan City Medical Court in Hyechang-dong. Medical examinations were conducted that resulted in the sports teacher being sent to jail for sexual assault against minors.

The jail wardens told each other this story and angrily labeled the sports teacher as subhuman.

The middle school sports teacher had treated the orphans as he pleased. He carried out unpardonable crimes, believing he would be safe because the children don’t have any parents to go after him.

After several months of preliminary hearings, the sports teacher received a sentence of fifteen years imprisonment and was hauled off to re-education camp.

Hearing about this incident, those locked up in the jail at the time felt deep shock. They promised each other to extricate themselves from that den of criminals so that their children would not have to suffer the same fate as the orphans.

Upon graduation, the orphans of Hyesan Middle School are assigned to shock brigades or factories. For example, many of the workers at Hyesan Shoe Factory are orphans who have graduated from Hyesan Middle School.

The factory cadres have made great pains to take good care of the orphans living in the factory’s dormitory. However, since the country has become poor and beset by straitened circumstances, they still struggle with hunger despite the extra care of the factory.

Because the orphans who were assigned to the shock brigades grew up without proper nourishment, they struggle to carry around shovels — which are as tall as they are — along the wide expanses of the Hyesan-Samjiyon railroad construction site where they work.

Until 2006, I was able to visit Pyongyang regularly and find out for myself that there are no such orphans wandering the streets of the capital.

However, when I took the train along the east coast, I saw the dirt-covered faces of the orphan children begging for food at each of the stations in Hamhung, Kowon, and Pyongsong.

Before I defected, there were many such orphans in Hyesan City Market, Hyesan Station, Wiyon Market, and other places where many people gathered. They were begging for food, picking scraps of food off the ground, trembling in the cold, and going about crying as they were hit by canes.

At Yonphung Market, along the road from Hyesan to Samjiyon, the orphan children hang out in groups by the market entrance. Among them, a young boy who had lost both his legs from a train accident sits at the market entrance.

He stretched out his hand to pedestrians passing by. “Please spare me a penny. I’m so hungry,” he cried languidly, almost as if he were reciting a Buddhist chant.

Seeing this orphan and others like him, it was hard not to think that North Korea has gone to ruin.

The wretched sight of these orphans was like a strong wind that whispered in my ear, telling me not to stay in North Korea any longer, and hardening my resolve to defect.

I left my hometown behind without regret, and crossed the Amrok River.

Edited by James Fretwell