Previews of the future

[izquierdista]

How to survive when the haves have cut the rest of the people loose? The latest edition North Korea Today has some stories on how people are surviving:

In front of Wonsan Station in Wonsan City, Kangwon Province, there are full of women trying to sell food. Choi Sun-hee (alias) has been selling tofu rice for ten years at Wonsan Station. Sometimes she also takes out to sell dumpling rice, bread, and rice cakes, but she mostly sells tofu rice. Putting rice into tofu that is mashed up into smaller pieces and fried into a sort of pancake, and adding a little bit of spice on top is called tofu rice. Just ten years ago so many people wanted it and Ms. Choi had a quite amount of income. Customers are largely travelers who did not have the time to prepare a meal on the train. Now the number of women selling tofu rice has increased so there is a lot of competition between them. She prepares about a hundred to a hundred fifty pieces of tofu rice a day and she barely makes 2,000 won with them. Due to the decrease of income the tofu pancake is becoming thinner, the amount of rice inside is decreasing, and even the spice that goes on top has lessened. As the quality of the food dropped, it was natural for the number of customers to decrease as well. In the winter it was pretty easy to store the foods that had not been sold, but as the days get warmer Ms. Choi is worried that the foods might get spoiled. Ms. Choi made a complaint saying, “Right now it is so hard to survive because the business isn’t going well. If I was young I could have at least gotten sold to China, but I can not even do that either. Living is very hard.”

2,000 won is worth less than a dollar, about enough to buy 1 kg of rice.


More stories at: http://goodfriendsusa.blogspot.com/