Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- The first time Yoon Hee was abandoned, she was an infant.
She was born in a village
near North Korea's sacred Mount Baekdu, where the country's lore claims
its founder, Kim Il Sung, led the fight for independence and his oldest
son, Kim Jong Il, was born.
But the similarities between Yoon Hee and her homeland's rulers end there.
Six months after her birth, her parents divorced and left Yoon Hee in the care of a friend.
The second time she was abandoned, Yoon Hee was 8 and had gone back to live with her mother.
One day, her mother told her she had somewhere to go. "She never came back," Yoon Hee said.
Yoon Hee had no choice
but to live alone in North Korea. So she did what many abandoned North
Korean children do -- living on the streets, nearly freezing to death in
the winters, begging for mercy, plucking grass for food and crying so
hard at night only the pain in her face could stifle her tears.
Yoon Hee stayed in the same neighborhood as her mother in the city of Hyesan, hoping they could live together again.
"I sometimes ran into her on the streets," Yoon Hee said, "but I couldn't ever get a warm feeling from her."
One time when they met,
Yoon Hee said, "she told me she was already having a hard time living by
herself, so she couldn't live with me."
But Yoon Hee was undeterred.
"I had a hope."
Death by electrocution
Amid tensions in the Korean peninsula, much of the focus has fallen on deciphering the next moves of Pyongyang's new leader, Kim Jong Un.
But all this belies a
humanitarian crisis in North Korea, a country that boasts of its
military strength and nuclear capabilities and yet has no place for
homeless orphans.
"There are many children
like me who die," said Hyuk Kim, who fled North Korea in 2011, nearly a
decade after becoming an orphan.
In the punishing
winters, Hyuk and other orphans would break into sheds containing
electric transformers near factories and markets to find a warm place to
sleep.
"Many children
accidentally end up touching the transformers while sleeping and die,"
said Hyuk, who asked that his real name not be used for the safety of
family members still in North Korea.
As Hyuk dozed off each
night curled next to a transformer, he would try to stay as still as
possible -- willing himself not to move in his sleep.
"I thought I would live forever this way," he said.