airmaxshoes2011

HE GAVE US WATER AND SENT US christian louboutin shoes gray boots MACHINES 163 us how to develop our farm," Chun said. Monuments commemorated those first visits by President Kim to give "on-the-spot guidance." Another monu- ment recalled louis vuitton damier 2011 his only other visit since then, in 1976. In the fall of 1978, just a few months before mens louis vuitton wallet cheap my visit, Kim had held forth on farming questions at a party committee meeting in Wonsan, the nearby capital of the province. There he had instructed men's vuitton wallet everyone to plant persimmon trees.15 "Whenever our Great Leader visited and saw our farmers working in the paddy Fields with crooked backs, weeding with hands and hoes, he told us that he couldn't eat rice with an easy mind when he saw such hard work," Chun said. "So he sent to our farm various kinds ofinsecticides, weed killers, weeding equipment, agricultural equipment. He sent these things to all co~ operative farms, but he paid special attention to this farm because ofits back- wardness." Still, Chonsam-ri was only an ordinary North Korean cooperative farm, Chun insisted - not a model farm such as the famous (and, to the West- ern ear, conFusingly similar-sounding) Chongsan~ri, where the country's agri- cultural policies had been incubated.16 Indeed, three visits by the peripatetic leader were not, relatively speaking, very many. Model Farm or not, Chonsam-ri had a prosperous look to it. The previ- ous year, Chun said, the farm had produced 4,200 tons of crops including3,600 tons of rice. The average share of each family was six tons of grain, which could be sold to the state, and cash in the amount of 3,000 cuon ($1,754 at the official exchange rate). That would have made the Chonsam-ri farmers slightly better off than average wage earners in the cities and towns. "During the past, the young people preferred to go to the city to work," the farm offi- cial said, "but now young people from the city are coming to the countryside because the living standards of cooperative farmers have improved." Farmers shared in the cooperative's income according to a formula set- ting norms for what would be considered a day's work in a particular task. Hand transplanting of rice seedlings is backbreaking work, and there were not enough rice-planting machines in operation in North Korea yet to make the old way obsolete. Bending to plant one hundred seedlings was considered a day's work. A farmer got due credit, in the form of added fractional "days worked," for overfulfilling the quota. On the other hand, plowing was mech- anized and a day's work was considered planting one hectare (two and a half acres). Farmers shared the grain crop, and cash earned by the cooperative from sales of vegetables and fruit, according to each family's total days workedt, officials said. But first, the cooperative took a portion out for the common fund to finance the next year's farming and development projects. The farm had to buy fertilizer and tractor fuel from the state and pay the state for wa- ter supply and tractor rental. The work on the farm remained hard and long. The farmers followed the old East Asian custom of taking a day of rest only every ten days. In the winter, though, there was a day off once a week, and each family could take