Inside North Korea: Delivering Aid in the World’s Most Isolated Country
Friday, October 2, 2026
4:00-5:30 pm (Eastern)
Furman Hall 326 and on Zoom
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This event is co-sponsored by the Overseas Press Club of America.
About the event
North Korea is one of the world’s poorest countries, but also one of the most challenging places to deliver humanitarian aid. For years at a time, its government has barred foreign aid workers, suspicious of their intentions. Swiss aid worker Kathi Zellweger, one of the very few Westerners to have lived in North Korea, and who visited the country seventy-five times over three decades, will share her experiences working with local medical experts, negotiating with suspicious government officials, and finding ways to help thousands of people, most of them children. She is joined by Mike Chinoy, a former CNN correspondent and repeat visitor to North Korea, with whom she wrote the book, Miss Kathi: Saving Lives in North Korea.
About the speakers
Kathi Zellweger is a senior aid manager with over thirty years of experience in Hong Kong, China, and North Korea. She was based in Pyongyang during 2006–2011 as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Before that, Zellweger worked in a senior post for the Catholic Agency Caritas in Hong Kong, where she played a key role in pioneering Caritas’s involvement in China and North Korea. She later established her own NGO, the Hong Kong–based KorAid Limited, to serve children in institutions and people with disabilities in North Korea. Zellweger is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a non-resident fellow at the European Center for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna. She holds a master’s degree in international administration from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Mike Chinoy is a non-resident scholar at the University of California, San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. Previously, he was a non-resident senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute. Before joining USC, he spent twenty-four years as a foreign correspondent for CNN. He was the network’s first bureau chief in Beijing, bureau chief in Hong Kong, and senior Asia correspondent. Chinoy won Emmy, DuPont, Peabody, and ACE awards for his coverage of China, and visited North Korea for reporting seventeen times.