Yet what they ship for eight centers might be shared among 20 institutions. Vitamins sufficient for 20 children may be administered to 50 instead. Such dilution of aid, we were told by those monitoring, is a bigger problem than diversion. At a county hospital of 350 beds the medicine cabinet has aspirin and expired antibiotics. The hard-working staff sterilize their hands in a bowl of carbolic acid.
Sheets are gray.
There is no soap to wash, a nurse tells us, so germs are easily spread. The wards are piercingly cold. Three years of flood and drought and the resulting loss of harvest have brought North Korea to this hard place. But seven years of slippage, beginning with the fall of the Soviet bloc, have now become a deep and general economic collapse. Although material things are paramount now, trust is vital for saving lives too.