In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, ordinary working people freely take part in the elections to State power organs. They have the right to elect and to be elected, irrespective of job, property status and educational background.
As everyone knows, even the elections to the local people’s assemblies, to say nothing of the elections to the Supreme People’s Assembly, are held amid great expectations and interest of the citizens.
July 19, 2015, a Sunday, witnessed elections to the People’s Assembly of County, City, Province held in the country.
A candidate for the Sub-constituency No. 102 of Constituency No. 107 for the election to the Pyongyang Municipal People’s Assembly was Ho Myong Gum, a driver of the Ryonmot Trolley Bus Company.
She is an ordinary kind of woman who can be found anywhere in the country. What is extraordinary about her is the fact that she has been working as a trolley bus driver for more than 30 years since finishing secondary school. Her husband Choe Hong Gi is working as her co-driver. They have covered about two million kilometres up to now.
The wife loves her job as she feels pride in providing traffic convenience to the citizens of the capital city. With such pride, she has driven the trolley bus from the Pyongyang Railway Station to Ryonmot-dong every day.
She says that she had a difficult period, though. It was in the late 1990s when the country was on an Arduous March due to the unprecedented sanctions and blockade by the hostile forces against her country and natural disasters that hit it for several consecutive years. Because of a shortage of electricity, trolley buses were not operating properly. But she did not abandon her job. She regarded her job as a duty assigned to her by the country. The harder the times were, the more efforts she made to remain faithful to her duty.
In fact, it was easier said than done for a woman to work almost all year round for thirty years. But she found the worth of her life in seeing the bright faces of people who were getting on and off her trolley bus and the daily-changing streets of the city. The pure conscience and patriotism of the woman driver who has remained faithful to her job, whether recognized or not, touched the heartstrings of all people.
Ho was nominated as a candidate to the Pyongyang Municipal People’s Assembly. On the election day Kim Jong Un, President of the State Affairs, personally came to the polling station.
Having congratulated Ho Myong Gum on her nomination as a candidate, he said that if she had worked as a trolley bus driver for 30 years since her girlhood, she had remained faithful to her job for so long. Then he encouraged her to work harder as a representative of the people so that she could live up to their expectations.
After receiving a vote from the chairperson of the election committee, he voted for her. Having come out of the polling booth, he, holding her hand, asked her to do more work as befitting a representative of the people.
Such a moving story can be created only in a country of the people where the working people support their sovereignty by their devoted efforts and where the people are the masters of everything and everything serves them.
