Everywhere you look, people are not getting enough food. The overall impression was of clear malnutrition almost everywhere. When you walked down the street, when you rode a car through the countryside you could see that people everywhere were not getting enough to eat. The funny thing though about this famine. I shouldn't say funny but the striking thing about this famine is that it's not occurring in the way that African famines unfold.
People tend to be ashamed of being hungry they tend to stay at home.
You don't have large scale population movements between different parts of the country. People stay in their own province or locale. They hope for the best. Another striking thing is the fact that it affects the cities more than the countryside especially the industrial cities in the north. We visited one, Wee Chong, which is in the northern part of the country or towards the north, and there you have people starving silently on the seventh floor of apartment buildings.