There is a child who took his first step at the age of five.

He is An Kyong Il, a second child of Kim Kyong Suk, a farmer at Wondang Farm in Songhwa County, South Hwanghae Province.

Soon after he was born, he was diagnosed as being unable to walk all his life.

So depressed by the unexpected misfortune, his mum visited many places with him, but his condition hardly improved.

Since then, she often cried alone. Even when he began to make a smile, she wept for his poor, weak legs. When she saw children of his age starting to walk, her sorrow grew.

“Can’t my son walk forever?”

Last year when Kyong Il was four years old, a young man happened to see him playing alone in the yard of his house.

The young man was Mun Ryu Song, a student at Pyongyang University of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts.

“Why are you playing alone?”

“I can’t walk. Others are walking...”

At this word, Mun could not leave him. He went into the boy’s house carrying him in his arms. The boy’s mother told him the entire story in tears.

While listening to her story, he felt a feeling of affection for the boy welling in his mind.

From then onwards, he visited Kyong Il almost every day, preoccupied by the thought of how he could help cure the boy’s legs.

His fellow students at the film director department of the faculty of cinematic art of Pyongyang University of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts joined him in his efforts to help the boy.

After returning to Pyongyang from the farm, they visited Kim Kon Yong, chief of limb orthopaedic surgery department of Pyongyang University of Medical Sciences Hospital.

Though he was an experienced surgeon, he had never seen such a case.

But he and his colleagues made a bold decision to go beyond the medical boundary and performed the first surgery on him in August last year.

Although it could develop a high risk of necrosis in the procedure, the operation was successfully carried out. Not content with this, they, however, held scores of consultations of the department for another operation.

After these preparations, they performed three rounds of operation on the boy and set about his rehabilitation.

In those days, teachers and students at Pyongyang University of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts and many others pooled their efforts to recover the boy.

At last one day in May Kyong Il began to walk for the first time in his life.

That day he was presented with many pairs of shoes as gifts.

Helping her son to put on shoes, his mother said in tears, “Now you can take part in International Children’s Day sports meetings.”

One month later she left Pyongyang with her son with a resolve to repay the benevolence of the state by fulfilling her duty as a farmer responsible for the granary of the country and bringing up her son admirably.

Jong Hwa Sun