NORTH KOREA: If it is a case of "our woman in North Korea", then Rose Dew is Ireland's woman there.
Ireland established diplomatic relations with communist North Korea only this year but Dublin's envoy doubles up as Ambassador to South Korea and lives in Seoul. So, as far as official Pyongyang is concerned, Dew from Concern is left to fly the flag.
Rose Dew, an Irish-New Zealander, runs the office of Irish aid agency Concern, which has been here since 1997.
Given the difficulties of working here, the suspicion with which the government regards foreigners and the fact that aid groups, including the UN's World Food Programme, do not have access to the whole country, Concern has made a strategic decision. While some groups, like Britain's Oxfam, have decided to leave, Concern has decided to stay.
Ms Dew arrived in North Korea 16 months ago after stints in several other places, including Kosovo. Here she is overseeing several major projects. These include giving support for the rehabilitation of irrigation schemes, distributing seeds and fertilizers to farms and winter clothes to children.
Over the last few years Concern has spent close on €4 million here. Some comes directly from the pockets of those who have forked out their pennies for the charity, but a lot comes from major donors such as the EU.
One of Concern's main projects has been in the little town of Pukchang, 100 kms north of Pyongyang. Here new water pipes, pumps and a water treatment system have brought water to thousands who either never had it, or who had lost it because machinery had simply fallen to pieces and pipes rusted away.
Concern also invested in new latrines for the local school. And it is here that you see just how desperate things have been in this still malnourished country. Ms Dew talks delicately about how, once a sufficient amount of the pupils' "night soil" has been deposited underneath the latrines, it is then gathered to be laid on the fields as fertilizer.
The "night soil" is needed because of the chronic lack of industrially-produced fertilizer here since the collapse of the old socialist trading block.
According to Ms Dew, Concern in North Korea faces two main problems. The first is that foreign donors are reluctant to give much more money over and above what is needed for humanitarian aid, although "the problems are bigger than that." The reason for this, of course, is that few want to be seen to be giving support to a regime with such a poor human rights record. "Fair enough," she says, "but the governments of other countries are not so great either and it hits the people who are trying hard to work and make ends meet."
The second big problem is trying to get past the barrier of suspicion in this deeply conservative communist country. Still, she says, North Korea is fun, if also "a little surreal."