Source: Open Doors, January 11, 2022
Each morning, Bae wakes up and starts her day in a rustic shack in a rural village somewhere in the mountains of North Korea. Her husband is groggy from the short night of sleep, and she can hear the rustling of the other people in her house getting ready for another day in the fields.
She hopes she’ll meet her work quota picking crops. She doesn’t want to risk additional punishment or the loss of her brief moments during the day when she can forage food. The government provides food for people like her—but just enough to keep them alive to work.
Finally, at dusk, she finishes her day. She gets another meal—some watery soup and, if she’s lucky, some rice—and returns to her home. And then Bae gets to her real work.
She waits for the moon to go behind the clouds, then silently pulls on her cloak. She slips out of the front door, careful to close it quietly so the neighbors don’t hear. As she makes her way through the village, she sticks to the shadows and steals back to the forest.
But this time, she isn’t foraging for food—what she’s after is even more important. She finds the tree with the gnarled roots and scrapes away a thin layer of dirt. She pulls out the plastic bag and tucks it under her cloak, returning to her cabin as quietly as she left.
When she gets home, her housemates are waiting—they’ve already covered the windows with blankets and lit a small candle. From the bag she dug up, she pulls out a book. She opens it and begins to read, in a voice barely above a whisper: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” It’s another day in a North Korean church.
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