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NKorean Defectors Struggle To Send Money Home
The disconnection between defectors and their families in the North during the pandemic is shutting down an important emotional and financial link between the rival Koreas, whose citizens are banned from contacting each other across the world's most highly armed border.
For the first time in years, Choi Bok-hwa didn't get her annual birthday call in January from her mother in North Korea. The pattern was always the same: Choi's 75-year-old mother climbed a mountain in the North with a broker who had a smuggled Chinese cellphone, and after wishing her daughter in South Korea a happy birthday, arranged a badly needed wire transfer.