During a 2013 visit to a hospital in Hamhung, Kathi Zellweger photographed two patients sharing a bed. Many observers would have regarded the scene as straightforward evidence of deprivation. Zellweger, however, found it encouraging. On previous visits, hospital beds had stood empty because there were no medicines, no food, and sometimes insufficient staff to treat patients. Two people occupying one bed therefore signals an improvement, she argues. The episode captures what makes Miss Kathi such an excellent book: the ability to place an observation within a longer history and recognize changes that a visitor without knowledge of context might miss.
Written with veteran journalist Mike Chinoy, the book recounts Zellweger’s decades of humanitarian and development work in North Korea. Between 1995 and 2019, she made 75 trips to the country and spent five years living in Pyongyang. Her work took her from Caritas to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and eventually to KorAid, the organization she established in Hong Kong in 2015. The result is an unusually rich account of how international engagement worked in practice, what it achieved, and why it so often struggled.