My 22 years helping North Koreans: Hong Kong aid worker on the suffering in hermit nation and its people’s hopes and dreams

All the Zellwegers come from the same area in Switzerland where I was born, the eastern part. Quite often, when I enter the United States, the immi­gration officer asks about (Hollywood actress) Renée. I always say she’s my very distant cousin.

Switzerland was a bit too enclosing for me, so I came to Hong Kong in July 1978 on a two-year contract. In Switzerland, I’d been a probation officer for young offend­ers and women. I always wanted to work with people at the fringe – overlooked people, not necessarily mainstream.

Sharp rise in Chinese food exports to North Korea as starving nation leans heavily on its only ally

(Catholic aid agency) Caritas Switzerland sent me out but, later, I became local staff for Caritas Hong Kong. Whenever I thought it was time to move on, something interesting came up. Initially, it was work in Hong Kong, then the Vietnamese refugees and then it was the opening of China in the early 1980s.

There weren’t too many foreigners travelling in those days – people usually had a shock when they saw me. We worked with children, disabled people, the aged, minority groups.

I remember one project – a literacy course (in Qinghai province) – with the Salar, a small Muslim group. When we got there we found out they didn’t have any paper. You know where they wrote their lessons? In the sand. But the women told us how grateful they were because now they could go to the market, they could read the instructions for the fertiliser, they knew which was the women’s toilet.

In 1993, at a United Nations meeting in Beijing for the Year of the Family, I met someone from North Korea and we stayed in touch. Later on, I was invited in and I said I’m not going as a tourist, I’ll go if there’s some­thing for Caritas to do.