Because we and other people in the US ought to think about gettting some priorities straight, my friend Dawn and I have decided to increase our awareness of the horrors of North Korea by decreasing our food intake until it resembles that of two young American journalists incarcerated in that country. On 8 June 2009 Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to twelve years' hard labor in a Korean prison camp. Just imagining their harrowing environment and starvation has preyed on me. A North Korean labor camp is a gulag, a deathtrap where slave inmates get plenty of torture and beatings, no medical care, and almost certain starvation.
I am paid to teach at a community college, and I complain about my job on occasion, feeling overburdened by the heaps of grading on my desk. However, I don't work a regular minimum of twelve hours a day like Lee and Ling are facing right this minute. I do work twelve-hour days sometimes, but I get paid and I get to do most of my work in the comfort of my home office with an iMac, a padded antique chair, and air conditioning. Lee and Ling will endure sweltering heat in fields, mines, and forests, all day, seven days a week, perhaps until they die. These camps routinely lose (kill) 25% of their population per year.
A major feature of life at the camp is torture. Kneeling on hot steel, being punched and kicked, and being starved and then forced to watch others eat are things ex-inmates report having endured. Women who give birth are forced to watch their babies murdered on the spot. Difficult inmates are locked in cells so small the inmates cannot sit or lie down for a month. Most of this last group die.
Medical care does not exist unless one counts forced abortions, or execution for becoming pregnant.
The diet at prison camps reportedly consists of corn, rice, cabbage soup, beans (generally stolen by guards), rats, salamanders, and cockroaches: all in the total amount of one small bowl a day.
I really can't simulate most of the above conditions, but I will eat one small bowl a day of rice, corn, and beans, or maybe a splurge of quinoa (no rats, salamanders, or cockroaches, thanks). I mean to stick with this diet for one month, starting on the four-month anniversary of their arrest. I may turn pretty mean, but I'm going to give it a try. God help my students during this time.
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